An Experimental Study Of Inquiry Reading For Cultivation Of Students' Critical Thinking In Senior High School

From the perspective of core competence,critical thinking has become an important focus in English curriculum reform.While in English reading teaching,more time is occupied for learning language knowledge of the reading materials,such as new words and expressions,complex and long sentences as well as grammatical knowledge.In this case,students find it difficult to think in high level and thus their critical thinking cultivation can not be successfully realized.Many studies indicate that students' critical thinking can be well improved by some appropriate teaching approaches,which emphasize the following points: students' team work,students' knowledge construction of their own experience,student-generated questions and problem solving,the arrangement of open-ended questions in teaching process.In addition,the significance of inquiry learning for students' core competence cultivation has been explicitly pointed out in the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017 version)(Ministry of Education 2018).Therefore,the author tries to carry out the teaching practice of inquiry learning in senior high school English reading class.This research is aimed at studying what effects inquiry reading has on students' critical thinking.The research questions are presented as the followings:(1)What effects does inquiry reading have on students' critical thinking?(2)What effects does inquiry reading have on students' critical thinking skills(analysis,inference,evaluation)?(3)What effects does inquiry reading have on students' general reading ability?In order to answer these three questions,a teaching experiment,lasting for nearly two months,has been conducted in Nanjing XX senior high school,Jiangsu Province.The researching subjects are ninety students in two parallel classes,senior one.Before the experiment,a pre-test is conducted to guarantee that the two classes are almost at the same level of critical thinking and general reading ability.Then inquiry reading based on five-E mode(engagement,exploration,explanation,elaboration,evaluation)is implemented in the experimental class,while the traditional teaching method is still adopted in the control class.After the experiment,a post-test is conducted for all the participants.In this research,the Washington State University's Critical Thinking Rubric,the questionnaire based on the framework of critical thinking skills in Delphi Report and reading comprehension tests are used for the data collection.And the data collected are processed by SPSS 17.0.The findings show that(1)inquiry reading is more effective in promoting students' critical thinking;(2)inquiry reading is more effective for students' improvement of critical thinking skills.To be more specific,it has more advantages in students' progress of inference and evaluation,while for analysis improvement,it doesn't have such advantages;(3)inquiry reading is more effective for improving students' general reading ability.Based on this findings,the author holds that(1)as one of the effective methods for critical thinking cultivation,inquiry reading should be more widely used in English class;(2)in reading teaching,teachers need to design reading questions elaborately,which can promote students to think in high level;(3)teachers should provide positive feedback for students to explore independently.