A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Disposition And English Reading Comprehension Achievement

From Socrates' midwifery to Dewey's reflective thinking,until it is universally established as one of the goals of education,critical thinking has a profound historical tradition.Critical thinking has been widely valued since it was proposed,and it has always been a research hotspot in western countries.In contrast,domestic research on critical thinking starts relatively late,mainly focusing on theoretical research and the research fields are mostly in logic,nursing,psychology and so on.Critical thinking includes critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition.In recent years,linguists and educators have applied critical thinking to second language acquisition,including the study of critical thinking and English learning,but mainly focus on writing,listening and speaking.What's more,the previous study subjects are mainly college students or English majors,paying little attention to high school students,and there are few studies on critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension achievement.The study is aimed at exploring the correlation between high school students' critical thinking disposition and their English reading comprehension achievement,in order to put forward some suggestions for improving students' critical thinking and English reading proficiency.The study employed the questionnaire and test to collect relevant data.The subjects were 200 senior two students who were investigated for their critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension achievement.The study mainly focused on the following two questions:(1)What's the current situation of students' critical thinking disposition?(2)What's the correlation between students' critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension achievement?In this study,descriptive analysis,Pearson correlation analysis and regression linear analysis in SPSS software were used to conduct data statistics and reached the following conclusions: firstly,the students' overall critical thinking disposition tended to be positive but unstable.The seven dimensions of critical thinking disposition from high to low were inquisitiveness,cognitive maturity,open-mindedness,analyticity,self-confidence,systematicity and truth-seeking.Secondly,there was a significant positive correlation between students' critical thinking disposition and their English reading comprehension achievement.At the same time,the data also showed that all the seven dimensions of critical thinking disposition were significantly positively correlated with the reading comprehension achievement.Moreover,there was a positive correlation between the types of questions in English reading comprehension and some dimensions of critical thinking disposition,while others had no correlation.And the critical thinking disposition and its seven dimensions had a predictive effect on English reading comprehension achievement to a certain extent.Based on the above research results,the author proposes corresponding suggestions,points out the shortcomings and limitations of this research,and provides suggestions for future research.