The Correlation Between Critical Thinking Skills And English Reading Scores Of The Grade-2 Senior High School Students

English reading,one of the most important input methods for English learners,plays an important role in senior high school English teaching.As a comprehensive ability of analysis,interpretation,inference and judgment,critical thinking skills are a must for contemporary students.This thesis tries to explore the relationship between critical thinking skills and English reading scores and to provide advice for English reading teaching.Based on the existing studies on critical thinking skills and related theories of English reading,this study chose 275 Grade-2 students from a senior high school?GSSHS thereafter?in Zhangzhou as subjects and employed the research methods of survey and interview.This study aims to explore three questions:?1?What is the current status of Grade-2 senior high school students'critical thinking skills including critical thinking disposition and critical thinking performance??2?What is the correlation between critical thinking disposition and the English reading scores??3?What is the correlation between critical thinking performance and the English reading scores?The results are as follows.?1?GSSHS have a positive critical thinking disposition,but they don't do well in critical thinking performance.In addition,8 dimensions of critical thinking disposition,ranked by scores,are from open-mindedness,justice-orientedness,congnitive maturity,inquisitiveness,truth-seeking,analyticity to systematicity and self-confidence.Five dimensions of critical thinking performance,ranked by scores,are from inference,analysis,interpretation,explanation to evaluation.?2?The Pearson correlation coefficient between critical thinking disposition and English reading scores is 0.487.Three dimensions of critical thinking disposition,the congnitive maturity,analyticity and truth-seeking have positive correlation with English reading scores as well,with Pearson correlation coefficients being 0.628,0.552 and 0.360.Congnitive maturity,analyticity and truth-seeking have positive predictive effects on Englishreading scores.The regression equation is:Y=8.290+0.266X₁+0.194X₂+0.16X₃?Y stands for reading score;X₁for congnitive maturity;X₂ for analyticity;X₃ stands for truth-seeking?.The rest of dimensions have low correlations with English reading scores,so they can be neglected.?3?The Pearson correlation coefficient between critical thinking performance and English reading scores is 0.539.Two dimensions of critical thinking performance,inference and interpretation have the significant correlation with English reading scores and their Pearson correlationcoefficientsare0.530and0.385.Theregression equationis:Y=17.721+0.827X₁+0.953X₂?Y stands for reading score;X₁ for inference;X₂ for interpretation?.The other 3 dimensions have low correlations with English reading scores and can be ignored.According to the research results,the author proposes some suggestions on improving senior high school students'critical thinking skills and English reading,hoping to provide certain reference for further researches.