| The newly-revised English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition 2020 Revision)puts higher requirements on the cultivation and development of students’ thinking quality in senior high English teaching and identifies activity as the main way to develop students’ thinking skills.Previous studies also show that teachers can employ various teaching activities to develop students’ different thinking skills in English reading classes.However,most current reading teaching attaches importance to language knowledge learning,reading skill development,and text content comprehension,but principally cultivates students’ thinking skills at lower levels.The post-reading stage,which mainly consists of the activities of applying & practicing and the activities of transferring & creating from the activity-based approach to English learning,is a major stage of language output and an important platform for developing students’ higher-order thinking skills.This study carried out a three-month case study on the post-reading activities implemented by six senior high English teachers in reading classes in a secondary school in Chengdu through classroom observation and interview,chiefly answering the three questions below:(1)What are the overall features of post-reading activities implemented by teachers in senior high English reading classes?(2)What students’ thinking skills in lower-order thinking and higher-order thinking are developed by the post-reading activities used by teachers?(3)What are the reasons for the above characteristics of post-reading activities?18 reading lessons of six senior high English teachers were observed,and the six teachers were interviewed separately after class,too.It is found that the post-reading activities for higher-order thinking in real senior high English reading teaching have the following characteristics.Firstly,in terms of number and time,adequate post-reading activities are appropriately and completely carried out in most senior English reading classes.Thus,students have enough time to accomplish lots of post-reading activities to develop different thinking skills.However,there are a few cases in which post-reading activities are finished hastily or cannot be accomplished in class because of improper time arrangement or time management of activities.Besides,post-reading activities are in diverse forms and of various types.The most frequently used form is discussion and the most frequently adopted type is analyzing & judging.These post-reading activities mainly facilitate students’ reading comprehension and language knowledge learning and develop students’ thinking skills at different cognitive levels.Secondly,the post-reading activities implemented by teachers mainly develop students’ higher-order thinking,among which the analyzing skill is the most,the evaluating skill is less and the creating skill is the least,and also develop students’ lower-order thinking,among which the applying skill is the most and the understanding is the least.The study also discovers the reasons why post-reading activities have the aforementioned two characteristics and the reasons chiefly include teachers’ deficient teaching experience,teachers’ outdated teaching views,teachers’ insufficient knowledge of students’ cognitive levels,and the lack of teaching support.The study centers on the characteristics of post-reading activities to develop students’ higher-order thinking in senior high English reading classes and provides the corresponding advice after analyzing the reasons from several aspects,hoping to offer teachers some enlightenment to optimize the design and implementation of post-reading activities so as to better develop students’ higher-order thinking.In addition,the study can enrich the studies of post-reading activities to some degree. |
