A Study Of The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking Ability And Their English Reading Proficiency

As we all know,English reading proficiency,one of the four basic English skills,plays an important role in English teaching and learning.In recent years,lots of educational experts put forward that the students’ English reading proficiency can be developed through the way of cultivating their critical thinking ability.Moreover,English Curriculum Standards for General High School(2017 Edition)emphasizes that the English reading comprehension test in the college entrance examination should involve the test of the students’ critical thinking ability.Besides,from Cheng Xiaotang’s(2019)perspective on the English reading ability,it can be known that English reading is a very complicated mental activity.And in the process of English reading,students need to comprehend passages,at the same time,their critical thinking abilities,such as analysis,reasoning,evaluation,interpretation and explanation,are also generated.So it can be seen that English reading proficiency may be closely correlated with critical thinking ability.Therefore,this thesis focuses on the correlation between critical thinking ability and English reading proficiency,and the author tries to explore the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of the senior high school students’ critical thinking ability(including critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills)?(2)What is the current situation of the senior high school students’ English reading proficiency?(3)Is there a correlation between senior high school students’ critical thinking ability and their English reading proficiency? If yes,what is it?In order to find out the answers for the above questions,the author takes 102 seniorthree students from Chongqing No.18 Middle School as the research subjects.The author adopts Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version(abbreviated as CTDI-CV),California Critical Thinking Skills Test-Chinese Version(abbreviated as CCTST-CV)to assess the current situation of senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and skills,and four English reading passages from college entrance examination are adopted to test senior high school students’ English reading proficiency.The author utilizes Microsoft(Excel)and SPSS version 22.0 to make a detailed description of the data obtained from the questionnaire and test.The results are shown as follows.(1)Senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and skills are at a medium level.For the sub-dimensions of CTDI-CV,senior high school students have a high level in the three dimensions of truth-seeking,open-mindedness and cognitive maturity,and they are at a medium level in the other four dimensions.For the six sub-skills of CCTST-CV,senior high school students score the highest in the interpretation skill,followed by the analysis skill,the evaluation skill,the inference skill,the explanation skill and the self-regulation skill.(2)Senior high school students are at a medium level in English reading proficiency.To be specific,in a test with total 30 scores,less than one third of students score less than18;more than one third of the students score from 26 to 30;the majority of the students in the English reading comprehension test reach the score between 20 and 24.(3)There exist significant and positive correlations between the senior high school students’ English reading proficiency and their critical thinking disposition and skills.About the sub-dimensions of critical thinking disposition,except for self-confidence and cognitive maturity,are significantly and positively correlated with English reading proficiency.Based on the research results,some implications from the perspective of teachers and students are put forward as follows.Implications for teachers: take targeted measurements to cultivate the students’ critical thinking ability based on the current situation of the senior high school students’ critical thinking ability.Specifically,1)Conduct the student-centered classroom teaching mode.2)Attach great importance to create a relaxed learning atmosphere.3)Pay more attention to classroom questioning.Implications for students: 1)Cooperate with the teachers in the cultivation of their criticalthinking ability.2)Participate in classroom activities as active as possible.3)Do some reading in different fields as much as possible.In addition,the limitations of the study are presented as well as the suggestions are offered for the improvement of follow-up research in this field.