| Innovation sustains the progress of a nation and also is the driving force of national prosperity.Innovative thinking ability means to create,that is,it can not only help reveal the nature of things,but also put forward new,constructive assumptions and opinions on this basis.Compared with general thinking ability,it is characterized by the anisotropy of thinking orientation,the flexibility of thinking structure,the leap of thinking process,the integrity of thinking effect and the novelty of thinking expression.National English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017)defines the thinking quality as one of the cultivation goals of the core qualities of English discipline.As an important part of the thinking quality,the cultivation of students’ innovative thinking has become one of the emphases of cultivation of thinking quality of English education.However,as an important way to cultivate innovative thinking ability,there are some problems in reading teaching in senior high school such as the insufficient exploration of thematic meaning as well as the failure to better develop students’ innovative thinking ability due to the long-existing influence of traditional teaching approaches and evaluation standard.National English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017)also points out that exploration of thematic meaning should be the most important task of students’ language learning,which affects degree of discourse comprehension and the level of thinking development and the effectiveness of language learning directly.Based on constructivist learning theory and Guilford’s theory of intelligence,this research combines theme-based English reading teaching and innovative thinking ability,aiming to explore whether theme-based English reading teaching is effective in developing students’ innovative thinking ability and to provide some methods for English teachers to cultivate students’ innovative thinking ability.This study takes students from two parallel classes in Grade One of Affiliated High School of Taiyuan Normal University as the research subjects.One is regarded as the experimental class,the other as the control class.Firstly,the level of innovative thinking ability of students in the two classes is tested,and the texts from Compulsory One and Compulsory Two published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press are selected for the new teaching design while contrasting the traditional ones.Then,in the experimental class theme-based English reading teaching is adopted,while in the control class traditional reading teaching model is adopted to conduct the two-month experiment.With the help of questionnaire,interview,and test,this research examines the effects of theme-based English reading teaching on the cultivation of senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability based on an analysis of their existing levels of innovative thinking ability.The research aims to answer the following four research questions:(1)What is the effect of theme-based English reading teaching on the overall level of senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability?(2)What is the effect of theme-based English reading teaching on originality of senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability?(3)What is the effect of theme-based English reading teaching on flexibility of senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability?(4)What is the effect of theme-based English reading teaching on fluency of senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability? The results of the research show that theme-based English reading teaching has a positive impact on cultivating students’ innovative thinking ability,including originality,flexibility,and fluency of innovative thinking ability.Finally,this research provides reasonable suggestions for developing senior high school students’ innovative thinking ability,and also hopes to provide reference for research on theme-based English reading teaching. |
PDF Full Text Request