Research On The Effects Of Scaffolding Teaching On Improving Students’ Critical Thinking At Senior High School

In recent years,critical thinking has aroused a heated discussion in the field of English education.Core Competencies and Values for Chinese Students’ Development(2016)pointed out that core competencies and values are necessary qualities and key competences to adapt to students’ lifelong development and social development.On the basis of English subject,The New Standards of English Curriculum for Senior High School(2017 edition)put forward English disciplinary-based core qualities,which require students to gradually have correct values,essential qualities and key abilities by learning English.For students at senior high school,critical thinking is one of necessary abilities and one of important thinking qualities to help students learn for life.Therefore,how to cultivate students’ critical thinking in the language-oriented English teaching at senior high school has attracted the attention of many experts and scholars.At present,domestic studies on combining the cultivation of students’ critical thinking and English teaching are mainly focused on the field of writing,namely studies on developing students’ critical thinking in the reform of English writing courses,and studies on developing students’ critical thinking in teaching a specific genre of writing.As an important part of the teaching content at senior high school,argumentative writing requires that students use their critical thinking to coordinate arguments,grounds of arguments and modes of argument,which provides theoretical and practical possibilities to combine the development of critical thinking and argumentative writing teaching.However,few researches have been devoted to applying a specific teaching method with the aim of developing students’ critical thinking.Thus,based on argumentative writing,this thesis studies the effects of scaffolding teaching on improving students’ critical thinking at senior high school.The two research questions are as follows:(1)What are effects of scaffolding teaching of English argumentative writing on improving students’ critical thinking disposition?(2)What are effects of scaffolding teaching of English argumentative writing on improving students’ critical thinking skills?In this 14-week experimental research,survey questionnaires and two writing tests were administered,with a total of 130 senior two students in two classes at Tianshui No.1 Senior High School,Gansu Province,as the research subjects.There were 66 students in Class 15,which was the experimental class,and 64 students in Class 12,serving as the controlled class.The scaffolding teaching of English argumentative writing was adopted in the experimental class while the traditional teaching of English argumentative writing was implemented in the controlled class.In the present study,the Critical Thinking Disposition Questionnaire(Wen,2009,2012)was adopted to undertake surveys before and after the experiment,and the students’ English argumentative writings before and after the experiments were analyzed on the basis of the Critical Thinking Skills Rating Scale(Zhang,2016).All the statistics was processed using SPSS 22.0.It is concluded that,compared with the students in the controlled class after the 14-week experiment of applying the scaffolding teaching of English argumentative writing,(1)the ones in the experimental class significantly improved their critical thinking disposition in terms of analysis,inquisitiveness and truth-seeking quality;(2)the ones in the experimental class significantly improved their critical thinking skills in terms of interpretation,analysis,evaluation,inference,explanation and self-adjustment.In conclusion,scaffolding teaching of English argumentative writing can promote the improvement of students’ critical thinking at senior high school.This thesis also provides some implications for the teaching of English writing at senior high school.