The Application Of Critical Reading Strategies To English Reading Instruction For College English Majors

In the Information Age, critical thinking ability is required to judge, analyze and select an overwhelming amount of information from multiple channels. In English teaching, critical reading is an important way to cultivate critical thinking ability. Nevertheless, focusing on vocabulary, grammar and text structure, traditional reading teaching lacks deep thoughts and exploration about the text content and writing purposes. Consequently, students’abilities of identification, analysis and evaluation are gradually stifled in the long-term cramming education.The present thesis has explored the application of critical reading strategies to English reading instruction for college English majors so as to provide reference in popularization of critical reading strategy training in English critical reading teaching.Under the guidance of constructivist learning theory, schema theory, metacognition theory and on the basis of the achievements on the critical reading researches at home and abroad, the present author attempts to answer the following questions:1)How often do college English majors use critical reading strategies?2) Will strategy training bring about an increase of college English majors’ critical reading comprehension proficiency?3) What is the relationship between critical reading strategies and critical reading comprehension proficiency?This empirical research lasted for 16 weeks with 73 freshmen majoring in English education in Hunan Normal University as subjects. Explicit training model and separated training model were applied together to the eight strategies training, namely, previewing, analyzing, annotating, self-regulating, summarizing, evaluating, comparing and inferring. Each strategy was trained separately for two weeks with two strategy training classes lasting for 45 minutes each in a week. Research instruments like reading tests, questionnaires and interviews were used before and after the training to collect the data. Besides, paired-sample T-test and multiple liner regression analysis were also employed to analyze the data.The result shows that:1) The use frequency of critical reading strategies of college English majors is at low level, of which, the use frequency of annotating, self-regulating, evaluating and comparing are even lower; 2) College English majors’ use frequency of critical reading strategies is increased after 16 weeks’ training, but doesn’t reach the high level. The use frequency of previewing, analyzing, annotating, summarizing, comparing and inferring are increased obviously while self-regulating and evaluating don’t increase to a significant level; 3) The increase of college English majors’critical reading comprehension proficiency arrives at a significant level after the strategy training. Furthermore, multiple liner regression analysis reveals that previewing, evaluating, annotating, analyzing, summarizing, comparing and inferring are highly related to critical reading comprehension proficiency. We can also find that there exists causal relationship between annotating, inferring, summarizing strategies and critical reading comprehension proficiency, and that changes in the three factors can largely account for students’critical reading comprehension proficiency.To sum up, the training of critical reading strategies exerts a certain facilitated influence on enhancing students’use frequency of critical reading strategies. Meanwhile, it proves to be an effective way to enhance college English majors’critical reading comprehension proficiency. The empirical research replenishes present studies on critical reading and provides some reference for further improvement in the training of critical reading strategies as well.