An Evaluative Study Of Reading Task Design In Junior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Critical Thinking Ability

English courses are both instrumental and humanistic,and language learning should be used as a means to develop thinking ability.The newly released English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 edition)once again emphasizes that teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of students’ thinking ability in the process of language learning and application.As one of the key abilities,critical thinking ability has attract extensive attention worldwide.Reading is an effective way to develop students’ critical thinking ability,so the design of reading tasks in textbooks should fulfill the training objectives of critical thinking ability and integrate language learning with critical thinking ability.However,current reading teaching in English education still focuses on mastering language knowledge and staying at the shallow reading,and there are few empirical studies on Chinese English textbooks and the cultivation of critical thinking ability.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out research on the design of reading tasks in English textbooks.This is not only conducive to the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability,but also a requirement to implement the concept of the new curriculum standards and cultivate the core quality of English subject.The purpose of the study is to examine whether the reading task design in the English textbook facilitates students’ critical thinking ability development.Therefore,this study adopts text analysis method,focusing on the reading section,and studies the reading task design in the junior high school English textbooks by People’s Education Press(in short,PEP),in order to gain an insight into whether the reading task design facilitates the cultivation of critical thinking ability,and explore the distribution characteristics of tasks.Based on the analysis framework constructed by Chen et al.(2020),this study codes all the tasks in the reading section of the textbook,analyzes the characteristics of the tasks from the dimensions of frequency,form and scope,and tries to answer the following three questions:1.What are the characteristics of reading task design in the English textbooks?2.How does the reading task design of the textbooks support the development of students’ critical thinking ability?3.What are the problems of the reading task design in the English textbooks?The major findings of the research are:(1)There are various types of reading tasks at different difficulty levels in the junior high English textbooks,generally in line with the law of learners’ cognitive development.(2)The number of tasks for developing critical thinking ability increases from the low to the high grade textbooks.(3)The tasks for developing analytical,inferential and evaluative abilities in the textbook are unevenly distributed;the difficulty levels of tasks are not differentiated reasonably among the three junior high school grades;only a few types of tasks for developing evaluative ability can be found.Based on the above results,relevant suggestions to the textbook writers and teachers are put forward respectively,and the future research direction in related fields is also considered.