An Empirical Research On Improving Students’ Thinking Quality In Teaching English Reading

The General senior high school English curriculum standards(2017)point out English curriculum objective is to cultivate students’ four core qualities of language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.Thinking quality is a new element of literacy and is also one of the core tasks of curriculum reform.It has become the focus and research subject to English teaching at present.However,under exam-oriented education,English teaching focuses on mastering knowledge and ignoring cultivating thinking quality.Reading plays an important role in senior high school and is the main way to cultivate students’ thinking quality.To make people realize the importance of thinking quality,the author collated and analyzed kinds of literature at home and abroad.It is found that many scholars have studied thinking quality and put forward corresponding training strategies.However,there are few studies on the current situation of cultivating senior students’ thinking quality in teaching English reading from the six levels of Bloom’s cognitive objectives.Therefore,the author investigated the current situation of the thinking quality of students in a senior high school in Luohe City.This study mainly investigates the following issues:(1)What is the current situation of students’ thinking quality in English reading?(2)Are there differences in thinking quality between students of liberal arts and science and students of different learning levels in English reading?(3)How do teachers cultivate students’ thinking quality in teaching English reading?To solve the above problems,this study adopts questionnaires and interviews to investigate the current situation of cultivating thinking quality in teaching English reading.253 students and 41 teachers,from Zhaoling Experimental High School in Luohe City,Henan province,participate in the questionnaire,and 8 students and 6 teachers are interviewed.The questionnaires refer to the thinking quality tendency scale of Professor Xu and Huang(2013),the General senior high school English curriculum standards(2017),Bloom’s cognitive objectives and the actual teaching situation.Then SPSS 26.0 is used for reliability analysis,factor analysis,descriptive analysis and difference analysis of the collected data.The results are as follows:(1)Students’ thinking quality in English reading is generally good,and the performance of low-level thinking is better than that of high-level thinking.Students perform well in remembering and understanding and there is a little difference between them.They perform bad in applying and creating and there are great differences between them.They perform general in evaluating and analyzing.(2)There are differences in the thinking quality of students in different disciplines and at different levels.In terms of the difference of liberal arts and science students,there is a significant difference in remembering and there is no significant difference in the other five aspects.Liberal arts students are good at remembering,understanding,applying,evaluating and creating while science students are good at analyzing.In terms of the difference of learning level,there are significant differences.The students with good grades perform better in the six levels of thinking quality than those with poor grades.The students with medium grades are lower than those with slightly weak grades in understanding and analyzing,but higher than them in other aspects.(3)In the actual teaching English reading,teachers’ practices involve six levels of thinking quality.On the whole,teachers pay more attention to cultivating students’ low-level thinking,and the cultivation of high-level thinking needs to be strengthened.In low-level thinking,the vast majority of teachers pay more attention to students’ remembering and understanding but ignore the cultivation of applying.In high-level thinking,many teachers pay more attention to the cultivation of students’ analyzing and ignore the cultivation of creating and evaluating.Based on the research results,some meaningful suggestions have been put forward to help students better cultivate their thinking quality.It is also hoped that some findings of this paper can provide some enlightenment for frontline teachers and jointly promote the good development of students’ thinking quality.