An Empirical Study On Effects Of English Critical Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School(2017)puts forward clearly that teachers should help students to obtain the reading skills of prediction,scanning and guessing.Critical reading not demands readers to accept the information blindly,but encourages them to communicate with the author on the basis of exploring the deep meaning of the text.In this thesis,the critical reading teaching model is applied to check its effects on senior high school students’ frequency of using critical reading strategies and their reading abilities.With literature analysis,questionnaire and experiment,the author had carried on an empirical research in Zhanjiang Middle School from September 2019 to January 2020.The author used test papers,questionnaires and interview as research instruments.The author took116 students from two classes of Grade One as research subjects.Class 4 was chosen as the Experimental Class which adopted the critical reading teaching.Class 2 was considered as the Control Class which applied the traditional teaching method.This study attempts to check the effects of the application of critical reading teaching in senior high school:(1)Can senior high school students’ frequency of using critical reading strategies be increased?(2)Can senior high school students’ reading abilities be promoted ?After analyzing and discussing the research data,the author drew a conclusion as followed:1.Students’ frequency of using critical reading strategies can be increased after applying the critical reading teaching.In the Experimental Class,the students have a higher frequency of using analyzing strategy,especially in the aspect of “Telling the tone of the author”.The students also do better in the questioning strategy,especially in the aspect of “Questioning the author”.There is no big difference in the aspect of summarizing strategy,especially in the aspect of“ Writing the abstract” in the Experimental Class.2.Students’ reading abilities can be promoted after applying critical reading teaching.According to the results of pretest(16.30>16.00)(p=0.745>0.05),it concludes that students in these two class have similar English reading abilities before the experiment.According to the results of the post-test(20.40>16.35)(P=0.001<0.05),it concludes thatstudents in the Experimental Class do better than students in the Control Class in the aspect of reading ability.As for the specific question types,students in the Experimental Class make great progress in the aspects of “inference”;“guessing the word meaning”;“summarizing the main idea”,revealing that critical reading teaching has significantly improved students’ abilities in these aspects.There is no significant difference in the aspect of “locating the specific information”.In short,the author holds the view that critical reading teaching can bring positive effects on English reading class.Therefore,the application of the critical reading teaching must be strongly advocated.