A Study Of LTA-oriented Senior English Reading Teaching Design

The National English Curriculum Standards(NECS)for General High School emphasizes the development of students' key competencies of English subject,listing Thinking Quality as one of the key competencies of English subject.English reading teaching plays a vital role in both language knowledge learning and thinking skills training.However,current English reading teaching focuses heavily on language learning,ignoring thinking training.And the types of target thinking skills involved in previous research are not comprehensive enough and lack of hierarchy in terms of training.This study is conducted to explore how to improve students' Thinking Quality through English reading teaching.The author first extracts and defines 12 kinds of common Micro-skills of LTA under the guidance of the framework of Language Thinking Ability(LTA)established by Huang Yuanzhen et al.and the Performance Framework of Reading Abilities put forward by Wang Qiang et al.Then based on the Theory of Reading Hierarchy,View of Activity-based English Learning,theories of Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding,the author proposes a four-level and four-stage LTA-oriented Reading Teaching Model to develop students' LTA comprehensively,starting from Logical Thinking,through Critical Thinking and reaching to Creative Thinking,through a series of hierarchical reading teaching activities.Also,a case study of teaching design is carried out to demonstrates the specific implementation of the model,trying to explore its feasibility and practicability.The main contributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows: 1)The 12 kinds of common Micro-skills of LTA extracted and defined based on the Performance Framework of Reading Abilities helps determine the target of thinking skill training in each reading stage,which promotes the efficiency of language teaching and thinking training.2)The construction of four-level and four-stage LTA-oriented Reading Teaching Model contributes to the comprehensive development of students' Language Thinking Ability.Both the reading process and LTA are of hierarchy.Within the teaching model,students are guided to read and understand the passage from the surface to the deep,through Preparatory Reading,Literal Reading,Deep Reading,and Expansive Reading,in each process of which their thinking skills are trained and promoted in a hierarchical way as well by engaging them into four corresponding reading activities,including Preparatory Reading Activities,Learning and Understanding Activities,Application and Practice Activities and Transference and Innovation Activities.3)Through a complete case design,this thesis demonstrates the specific implementation of the model,which helps teachers in high school to apply it in teaching practice.The study is of practical value to teachers in senior high school in guiding them how to embed thinking skills training in English reading teaching.