A Study Of The Effects Of Literature Reading Teaching On Senior High Students’ Critical Thinking

As one of the objectives of the English course,the cultivation of critical thinking(CT)also reflects its educational value.With the introduction of the Core Competence of English,the development of CT has received an increasing amount of attention.However,in the current Chinese educational context,the cultivation of high school students’ CT is far from promising concerning both critical thinking dispositions and skills.As to teachers,they often lack the awareness of cultivating students’ CT in English classes,and pay most attention to the acquisition of vocabulary,grammar and other English knowledge and the training of listening,speaking,reading and writing skills.Due to the absence of guidance,high school students often neglect to cultivate their CT in English learning.In this current situation,the traditional English teaching mode is far from satisfactory as to the training of high school students’ CT.With the increasing popularity of English literature reading teaching studies,more and more researchers and educators have realized the significance of this aspect of research and have carried out relevant studies.English literature reading teaching tends to be more speculative due to the particularity of its genre,which provides beneficial materials for the training of high school students’ CT.Therefore,the author combines its advantages,trying to propose a more practical teaching mode in the current high school English class to cultivate the CT of high school students.The paper discusses the specific teaching case of this model and assesses its effect on the CT of high school students through both quantitative and qualitative research.The following two research questions need to be addressed:1.What are the effects of literature reading teaching on senior high students’ CT subdispositions?2.What are the effects of literature reading teaching on senior high students’ CT subskills?Considering about the comprehensiveness of definition of CT and its convenience,this study adopts APA’s definition of CT,which involves both critical thinking dispositions and critical thinking skills.Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version is used to evaluate students’ CT sub-dispositions before and after the experiment.Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills and two English writing tests are employed to measure students’ critical thinking sub-skills.Finally,four students are chosen to have an interview.In this three-month experiment,50 senior high students are chosen as the research subjects.At the end of the experiment,the collected data are analyzed by SPSS 20.The results show that literature reading teaching has a positive effect on students’ CT,involving critical thinking dispositions and critical thinking skills.As to students’ critical thinking sub-dispositions,six out of seven,namely truth-seeking,open-mindedness,selfconfidence,analyticity,inquisitiveness and systematicity dispositions,have demonstrated an obvious improvement except that maturity disposition shows little sign of improvement.As to students’ critical thinking sub-skills,inference,interpretation,evaluation,analysis and explanation skills are all improved to some extent while self-regulation skill is not improved apparently.As to pedagogical implication on reading teaching,teachers could design questions based on discourse analysis,aiming at cultivating students’ critical thinking sub-skills,namely interpretation,analysis,evaluation,inference,explanation and self-regulation.To be specific,as to the cultivation of interpretation,students should be guided to correctly identify the main purpose,articulate divergent points of view,attempt to categorize information and summarize main ideas or paraphrases in their own words.As to the cultivation of analysis,students should be guided to identify relationships among statements,concepts,judgments and opinions,detect arguments supporting and contesting points of view,distinguish relevant from irrelevant points of view,and identify biases and unstated assumptions.As to the cultivation of evaluation,students should be guided to assess credibility of the evidence,assess credibility of points of view and opinions,raise questions or objections to discover weakness in an argument and offer supplementary information that may strengthen or weaken an argument.As to the cultivation of inference,students should be guided to derive plausible conclusions from his own list of information,make a logical recommendation(not questions)for action,give recommendations for further inquiry and identify potential consequences.As to the cultivation of explanation,students should be guided to demonstrate breadth and depth of information,communicate clearly,accurately and precisely,use relevant information to support their opinion,and logically communicate in a structured form.As to the cultivation of self-regulation,students should be guided to demonstrate selfquestioning and self-validation,recognize their own need for further inquiry,reflect upon and justify their own thinking process and identify personal biases.Above all,the present study shows that literature reading teaching exerts a positive effect on senior high students’ CT.This study could also provide some pedagogical suggestions to the cultivation of CT and literature reading teaching.Of course,there exists limitations in the present study concerning limited experimental period and research participants.Hence,further studies are needed to extend the time for teaching experiment and contain more participants of senior high school.