Cultivating Students’ Thinking Skills In High School English Reading Class Based On The Activity-based Approach

The Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards（2017 Edition）（2018）states that the English curriculum aims to develop students’ core competences in English such as language ability,cultural awareness,thinking skills and learning capacity,among which thinking skills are included as one of the core competences in English for the first time,which highlights the importance of developing students’ thinking skills in English teaching.Research shows that English reading class plays an important role in the cultivation of students’ thinking skills.However,the current English reading teaching,influenced by exam-oriented education,attaches too much importance to the teaching of vocabulary and grammar,and there are few corresponding teaching activities consciously designed to cultivate students’ higher-order thinking skills in reading class.There is still a gap between the reading teaching practice and the current reading teaching concepts.In view of the above research background,this study,drawing upon Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy,Vygotsky’s theory of interaction between language and thinking and Piaget’s cognitive development theory,designs high school English reading classes from three levels of English learning activity（learning and understanding,applying and practicing,and transferring and innovating）,so as to develop students’ thinking skills.This study focuses on the following issues: 1)how can students’ thinking skills be enhanced with the application of activity-based approach? 2)What impacts does activity-based approach make on students’ thinking skills in English reading class?Focusing on the above two research questions,this study takes 40 students of grade one in H city as the research subjects,adopting activity-based approach in high school English reading class to conduct an teaching experiment of cultivating thinking skills for three months.In this study,classroom observation,interview,reading test are used to record all the information and data during the teaching experiment.Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are used to comprehensively analyze the influence of the activity-based approach on the cultivation of students’ thinking skills.The study found that the application of the activity-based approach in high school English reading teaching is effective.Firstly,through classroom observation,learning and understanding activities applied to pre-reading activities can well develop students’ logical thinking skills,while applying and practicing activities are mostly applied to while-reading activities and transferring and innovating activities are mostly conducted in the post-reading stage.The two reading stages,while-reading and post-reading,play an important role in the enhancement of students’ critical and creative thinking.Secondly,the reading test results show that the English reading class under the guidance of the activity-based approach can contribute to the improvement of students’ thinking skills,especially the improvement of the three dimensions of application,evaluation and creation.Finally,the interview shows that students generally believe that,compared with the previous English reading class,the current English reading class based on activity-based approach can be conducive to improving reading scores and cultivating thinking skills.