An Action Research On Applying Continuation Task To Cultivate Critical Thinking Disposition Of Senior High School Students

Critical thinking disposition is a kind of implicit mental state and subjective intention,which affects the formation of thinking quality directly and determines the effectiveness of thinking activities.The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High Schools(2017 Version2020 Reversion)puts the cultivation of students’ thinking quality into an unprecedented height.Thus,as the essential driving force to cultivate thinking quality,it is of great significance to cultivate senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition.Continuation task occupies an increasingly important status under the context of the new reform of college entrance examination,which has been gradually applied into the college entrance examination in some provinces.In continuation task,students make reasonable inferences about the later plot based on the previous plot bases on their inquisitiveness,truth-seeking,cognitive maturity and analyticity,completing the writing task under the guidance of self-confidence and systematicity eventually,whose process has a colse relationship with students’ critical thinking disposition.However,there are few research centering on the impact of continuation task on the cultivation of senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition.Due to the relative implicitness and flexibility of critical thinking disposition,related research should make corresponding adjustments on problems emerged in the research process.Action research is an introspective research for teachers.Researchers record the problems in each round of teaching implementation,observe the teaching results,make corresponding adjustments,and then carry out the new teaching plan,aiming to achieve better research results.Therefore,this research tries to apply continuation task to cultivate senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition,carrying out two rounds of action research and trying to answer the following two questions:(1)Whether the training of continuation task could improve senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition? If so,what sub-dimensions of critical thinking disposition have been enhanced and to what extent are they improved?(2)How to apply continuation task to improve senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition?The action research is carried out in two rounds,which lasts for 8 weeks.This research adopts questionnaire,interview and teaching journal to test and observe.First,the researcher adopted the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version(CTDI-CV)to test the critical thinking disposition of 34 students from class2,grade 1 in a senior high school in Pengzhou.Then,the researcher conducted the first round.In the first round of action research,the author adopted text interpretation and the search for key language points in prewriting;in post-writing,the author adopted three activities: evaluation on group members’ writings,writing revision and a sharing meeting on excellent writings.It can be found from observation that students’ critical thinking disposition are promoted to a certain extent.However,the improvement of students’ analyticity,systematicity and self-confidence is insufficient.Therefore,in the second round,the researchers added the application of flow map and scoring standards of continuation task to cultivate students’ analyticity,systematicity and self-confidence.The results show:(1)The critical thinking disposition of the students in the first grade of senior high school is generally at the weak level;after two months of action research,the critical thinking disposition of the students has been improved to a certain degree in general as well as in all sub-dimensions.Specifically,among the seven dimensions of students’ critical thinking disposition,systematicity,analyticity and inquisitiveness have improved significantly,while the changes in truth-seeking and self-confidence in critical thinking disposition are the least significant.(2)In pre-writing,the questions based on the key elements of narration and the flow map about the storyline can practice students’ analyticity,self-confidence,truthseeking,cognitive maturity,open-mindedness,systematicity and inquisitiveness.In the whilewriting stage,through the conceive of reasonable plot,students’ analyticity,self-confidence,truth-seeking and systematicity can be practiced effectively.In the post-writing],the evaluation of students’ writings,writing revision and the selection for best writing can cultivate students’ analyticity,inquisitiveness,self-confidence,open-mindedness,systematicity and cognitive maturity.In general,this study proves that the training of continuation task has improved senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition to a certain degree.Meanwhile,this research proposes that the flow map,group cooperation and writing revision can be adopted when designing the teaching activities of continuation task,aiming to cultivate students’ critical thinking disposition more effectively.