Cultivation Of Thinking Quality In English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

The English Curriculum Standard for General Senior High School(2017 Edition)proposes the four core competencies including language ability,cultural awareness,learning ability and thinking quality.The thinking quality requires students to distinguish and analyze specific facts in English culture,work out and summarize information,rebuild new concepts,analyze and infer the logic of information,correctly judge various ideas,and have the ability to preliminarily use English for independent thinking and innovative thinking.Therefore,to cultivate students’ thinking quality is the core issue that should be paid attention in the teaching of various subjects in the stage of basic education.However,there are still many problems in the cultivation of thinking quality in junior high school.Cultivating students’ thinking quality in English teaching effectively has become a challenge for English educators.But researches on cultivating the quality of thinking mostly focus on students in higher education.Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,this paper aims to find the way of developing thinking quality,through analyzing the problems and challenges which exist in the cultivation of thinking quality in English teaching.The subjects were the 80 students from Class 3 Grade 8 and Class 4 Grade 8 in Luoyang Foreign Language School.The study employed the teaching experiment of developing student’s thinking quality.Each student was given a pretest and a posttest on their thinking quality.The results showed that the students made a significant progress in the posttest,and the training for understanding,applying and creating had a significant effect on the improvement of students’ thinking quality.The students who did better in the pretest made less progress but they still behave better in the posttest.There was a significant correlation among the six dimensions of students’ thinking quality.Applying has a close relationship with remembering and they also have a connection with analyzing and understanding as well;evaluating has a positive correlation with creating.Here are four suggestions on how to cultivate students’ thinking quality in English reading class in junior high school: English teachers should pay attention to the necessity and feasibility of developing students’ thinking quality;Teachers should be sensitive about the individual differences between the students;The positive correlations among understanding,applying and analyzing should be taking into consideration when teachers design teaching activities;when choosing the activities,teachers should follow the principles of diversity,explicitness and persistence.