Research Concerning Effects Of Project-based Learning On Non-English Majors’ English Reading Comprehension And Critical Thinking Ability

As a language skill,reading plays an important role in college English learning.To a certain extent,it concerns the quantity and quality of students’ information acquisition,and determines the breadth and depth of their professional learning and future career development.With the rapid development of modernization,critical thinking ability has attracted more and more researchers’attention.Cultivating new innovative talents in twenty-first century requires students to think in an open and critical way,which is an extremely important and indispensable ability both in study and future life.As time develops,it is necessary to try some new teaching methods in college English teaching.Successful English teaching can’t be separated from student’s experience,but should be the student’s active experience.As a practitioner of this teaching concept,project-based learning(Pj BL)is a student-centered teaching method,and is also defined as a way to learn by implementing projects with clear objectives in this study.Therefore,this study applies PjBL to college English reading class,and discusses its effects on non-English majors’ reading comprehension and critical thinking ability.Mixed research method was utilized,encompassing a pretest-posttest comparison group design,tests,scale,and semi-structured interview.The research subjects were 78 first-year students from a university in Yanta District,Xi’an City,Shaanxi Province.In one-semester teaching experiment,PjBL was implemented in EC in contrary to the traditional teaching method in CC.English reading tests and the Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version(CTDI-CV)Scale were used in pre-test and post-test to test students’ English reading comprehension and critical thinking ability.In addition,a semi-structured interview was conducted after the end of the experiment in order to further explore the reasons for the changes in the quantitative research,and to probe into students’ views on PjBL,so as to provide suggestions for the implementation of this teaching method in the future.The research questions are:(1)What’s the effect of PjBL teaching method on non-English majors’ English reading comprehension?(2)What’s the effect of PjBL teaching method on non-English majors’ critical thinking ability?(3)What do non-English majors think of the implementation of PjBL teaching method in English reading class?After collecting all the data,Statistical Product and Service Solutions(SPSS)20.0 was used to perform independent sample t-test and paired samples t-test for quantitative data so as to analyze the significant difference between pre-test and post-test,CC and EC,Besides,NVivo 11.0 was applied to conduct the qualitative analysis of the interview data.The results show that:1.Under the guidance of PjBL teaching method,students’ English reading comprehension has been significantly improved(p<.05).Based on the interview,the main reasons for their progress are as follows:search and analysis of materials increase students’ access to authentic English,the cooperative implementation of the projects can stimulate their learning interest and improve their English reading speed,article comprehension as well as English language proficiency.2.Under the guidance of PjBL teaching method,students’ critical thinking ability has been improved.On one hand,their overall critical thinking ability has been improved from neutral level to positive level.On the other hand,they got significant improvement in open-mindedness dimension(p<.05)and inquisitiveness dimension(p<.05).Analysis of reasons from interview indicates that students need to sort out and analyze the materials by themselves.In the process of implementing project,their sense of ownership is aroused so as to learn more actively.Moreover,the multiple evaluation mechanism of PjBL also plays an important role.3.According to the interview,students may encounter some challenges in the process of group project implementation such as negotiating with group members,looking up materials,and presenting the project in English.Additionally,regarding the difficulties in project topic selection and excessive waste of time in PjBL class,interviewees put forward some reasonable suggestions,including teacher’s designation of the team leader,regular supervision of project progress,diversity and familiarity of the topics.