An Empirical Study On The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking Ability In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

The National English Curriculum Standard for General High school indicates that teachers should cultivate students’ critical thinking ability and innovation ability in teaching process.However,many language points should be mastered by high-school students,and their summative assessment is the university entrance exam.Facing the pressure of the university entrance exam,most teachers choose to pay more attention on the language points.They,however,ignore to cultivate and train the critical thinking ability of students.Based on the present situation,the author puts the critical reading teaching method into practice and takes students of grade one in high school as the research subject.From the perspective of teachers,the author proposes a targeted suggestion on reading teaching for stimulating students’ interest and improving the teaching effect.Based on the constructivism theory and Critical Thinking Skills theory,the author cultivated the critical thinking ability of high-school students with the “critical reading teaching” as the cut-in point.Two parallel classes in a high school of Hainan were selected as the experimental subjects,and the teaching experiment lasted for 12 weeks.Before the experiment,the author conducted a survey in the two classes with Washington State University Critical Thinking Appraisal and critical reading tests.During the experiment,students in the experimental class were taught with critical reading method.At the end of the experiment,the students were given the post questionnaire and the post-test,meanwhile,the experimental students were interviewed by the author.Finally,the author collected the relevant data,compared and analyzed,so as to reach the experimental conclusion.The results of this study show that :(1)It is an effective way to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability in English reading teaching of high-school;(2)The cultivation of critical thinking ability can promote the students’ critical reading ability.This study provides theoretical and practical basis for future study in critical reading teaching and also casts some lights to the related researches on English teaching.However,there are still some disadvantages.It remains to be further tested and perfected in the future.