A Case Study On Cultivating Students’ Critical Thinking In Junior High English Deep Reading Teaching

From the perspective of core competencies,critical thinking is an indispensable part of thinking quality,and reading teaching is one of the important paths to develop students’ core competencies.Moreover,reading is an important way to cultivate critical thinking,and thinking is an important condition for critical reading.In addition,deep learning emphasizes active learning,critical thinking and transfer application,which is an effective learning method to achieve core competencies.However,in the current English reading,the problems of supercivilization and fragmentation are widespread.Moreover,students are widely absent from thinking.These series of problems are all unfavorable factors that hinder the realization of core competencies.Under such circumstances,promoting critical thinking development through deep reading has become an inevitable requirement for students’ language and thinking development.In view of this,the author combines deep learning with reading to form a deep reading teaching concept.Guided by Eric Jenson’s DELC and the general process model of deep learning proposed by Wu et al,this study combines deep reading with critical thinking,and tries to build English deep reading teaching model to find an effective path for the development of students’ critical thinking.And it also seeks to explore the applicability and effectiveness of the model for developing students’ critical thinking.The case study is adopted in this study to explore the following three questions:(1)What effect does English deep reading teaching model have on the critical thinking of students at different levels?(2)What kind of critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions can be improved in English deep reading teaching?(3)What are the factors that hinder the development of students’ critical thinking skills?This study was conducted in Class 809 of Grade 8 in a junior high school in Zhejiang Province for 10 weeks.Through the test of CCTDI-CV and CTST of 41 students in Class 809,six participants of different levels were selected,one girl and one boy in each group.According to their comprehensive ability,they are divided into Group A,Group B and Group C.In the research process,the author uses questionnaires,interviews,self-assessment forms to collect data,and uses SPSS to analyze the data.Through the research,in the current teaching,the overall level of students’ critical thinking is relatively low,but the effectiveness of the English deep reading teaching model in developing students’ critical thinking is worthy of affirmation.The specific performance is as follows:(1)English deep reading teaching model can effectively improve critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills of students at different comprehensive level.In terms of critical thinking skills,two students in Group A with strong comprehensive strength have been observably strengthened;Moreover,in the aspect of critical thinking disposition,Group C,namely two students with low comprehensive level,has been significantly improved;(2)In terms of enhancing students’ critical thinking skills,English deep reading teaching model plays a significant role,especially in three aspects: evaluation skill,explanation skill and selfregulation skill.Relatively speaking,the skills of interpretation and inference are improved less.Among them,the improvement of explanation skill is the most significant,and the improvement of interpretation skills is the least.Besides,this teaching model can successfully strengthen students’ critical thinking dispositions.Among them,maturity and truth-seeking are significantly improved,but analyticity and inquisitiveness are not significantly improved.(3)In the process of deep reading and critical thinking training,in students’ opinion,the most challenge thing is the difficulty of questions set by the teacher,followed by the allocation of time,and finally the degree of relevance of the reading material to students’ real lives also affects their critical thinking development.Finally,some suggestions on English deep reading and critical thinking are put forward.Firstly,teachers should be fully aware of the value of deep reading in cultivating critical thinking of students at different level and make flexible use of English deep reading teaching model.Secondly,teachers are supposed to increase the types of questions and activities to guide students to think independently to effectively improve their comprehensive critical thinking ability.Finally,teachers should develop constructivist teaching concepts and fully take into account the levels of students’ ability.