| Reading ability is indispensable in students’ comprehensive English ability,and it is also the basis and precondition for students to develop other language skills.Besides,English reading class is the main battlefield for cultivating students’ reading ability.Therefore,it is particularly important for teachers to choose an appropriate reading teaching method to teach in class.However,the reading teaching method widely used in the current English classes only focuses on the teaching of language knowledge on the surface of the text,which is not conducive to improving students’ reading ability in a real sense,and it is difficult for students to enjoy learning English.Compared with the normal reading teaching method,the critical reading teaching model requires teachers to guide readers to read the deep information of the text critically according to certain standards on the premise of understanding the text to improve students’ reading ability,which not only meets the requirement of the National English Curriculum Standards for High School(2017)that students should read the passage critically combined with a specific context,but can stimulate students’ interest and enthusiasm in English reading.Therefore,the critical reading teaching model is worthy of reference and use by teachers in their teaching process.Based on constructivist learning theory and critical discourse analysis(CDA),this study aims at exploring the effects of the application of the critical reading teaching model on senior high school students’ reading performance(including four kinds of questions which are questions for inferring,for guessing the meaning of words,for locating and understanding details,and for generalizing main ideas)and their interest in English reading through a teaching experiment.This study treated the reading test papers and the reading interest questionnaire as research instruments,and the author chose students in two classes of Grade One in Zhouqu middle school in Lanzhou as the research subjects.One class was the Experimental Class(EC),while the other was the Control Class(CC),and each class had 50 students respectively.The teaching experiment lasted for four months.Before the study,the author did a pre-test of reading ability in EC and CC to test students’ reading level in the two classes,and did a pre-test of the reading interest questionnaire in EC to test students’ reading interest.During the study,the students in EC and CC were taught by the critical reading teaching model and the normal reading teaching method respectively.After the study,a post-test of reading ability in EC and CC was carried out to figure out the changes in students’ reading ability in the two classes,and a post-test of the reading interest questionnaire in EC was carried out to figure out the changes in students’ reading interest.Two research findings were gained after the experiment through analyzing the data collected from reading test papers and the questionnaire.First of all,the application of the critical reading teaching model can improve the reading achievements of students in senior high school,and the scores of the four questions of the students have improved in different degrees.Secondly,the application of the critical reading teaching model can make students in senior high school be more interested in English reading.Additionally,this study needs to be further improved due to the short duration of the experiment,the limited sample size,and the limited theoretical knowledge and experimental experience of the author. |
