A Practical Research On Cultivating Critical Thinking Ability Of Senior High School Students By Continuation Writing Teaching

With the deepening of the national reform of primary and secondary education and the introduction of National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017),there is a growing awareness that good critical thinking ability enables high school students to expand the breadth and depth of their thinking,to refrain from blindly trusting authority and to develop positive thinking habits.Therefore,there is an urgent need to implement the task of developing students’ critical thinking ability in senior high school English teaching.As a type of task that closely combines language input and output,continuation task can fully activate and exercise students’ thinking in the writing process.The author investigates the effect of this question type in developing students’ critical thinking ability by training them in an experiment.The aim of this study is to address two questions:1)What is the current situation of high school students’ critical thinking ability?2)Can the continuation writing teaching enhance students’ critical thinking ability?In order to address the above questions,both quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted.Firstly,in terms of quantitative research,the author took a Senior 2 class in a Quanzhou secondary school as the research subject and adopted teaching strategies such as promoting students’ alignment with the text,using Think-aloud Protocols to retrace the thinking process of students in the teaching experiment.California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(Chinese version)and Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills were used to test the students’ critical thinking ability before and after the experiment.At the same time,another class in the same grade at the school was set up as the control group to compare the differences in critical thinking ability between the students who only experienced regular writing instruction and those in the experimental group before and after the experiment.Secondly,for the qualitative study,ten students in the experimental group were selected based on their different English language performances and given the think-aloud test.Their specific critical thinking skills were then analyzed by recording and transcribing their thinking processes.At the same time,the interview method was used to continue interviewing the five participants who were in relatively low English proficiency among the ten students so as to understand their dilemmas in critical thinking ability.Qualitative research for this paper was conducted at the end of the teaching experiment.The results of the study show that: 1)The current state of the critical thinking ability of high school students is not satisfactory,but after nine weeks of the continuation writing teaching,the students in the experimental group have both improved their critical thinking dispositions and critical thinking skills.In terms of critical thinking dispositions,their open-mindedness,self-confidence,and systematicity have been improved significantly,with the least significant changes in inquisitiveness and analyticity;in terms of critical thinking skills,their inference,interpretation,and evaluation skills have been improved most significantly.This suggests that the design of this teaching experiment is sound and confirms the role of the continuation writing teaching in developing students’ critical thinking ability;2)Students with different levels of English proficiency showed certain differences in the use of critical thinking skills in continuation task.Students with higher English proficiency used skills including interpretation,evaluation,analysis and self-regulation frequently,while students with lower English proficiency were more likely to use skills such as inference and interpretation;3)Through post-experimental interviews with students in the experimental group,the author gained further insight into their views on critical thinking ability and continuation task and these ideas and opinions can provide some brand new implications for high school English teaching.