An Investigation Into Critical Reading Teaching In Junior High School English Class

Critical thinking ability is a necessary ability for innovative talents in the new age,and one of the essential thinking qualities for middle school students required in the New Curriculum Standards in China.Critical reading is a reading mode proposed by western scholars to cultivate critical thinking.Its purpose is to recognize the facts and opinions of the reading article,to judge and evaluate the author’s writing purposes,viewpoints and tones,to understand the author’s implied meaning,and to form the reader’s own opinions.Critical reading teaching is an important means to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability.Therefore,researchers in the educational field have conducted a lot of research on critical reading teaching and gained abundant achievements.However,most of these studies have focused on college and senior high school students,but not on junior middle school students.The study investigated the current situation about the critical reading teaching in junior high school by observing 15 English reading lessons in Grade 8 and interviewing 10 English teachers.The research results show that the current situation of critical reading teaching is not good.Teachers have awareness to develop students’ critical thinking skills,but the English critical reading teaching in junior high school is at a superficial level.Most teachers pay attention to the cultivation of low-level critical thinking skills which are interpretation,inference,explanation and shallow analysis,but cultivation of the high-level critical thinking skills which are deep analysis,questioning,evaluation and self-evaluation is ignored.In addition,the cultivation of critical text interpretation skills is the most insufficient because of the lack of theoretical and practical guidance in implementing critical reading teaching.And teachers’ critical teaching process is scarce because critical reading teaching in junior high school English is restricted by the test environment.Based on the above findings,this study proposes some strategies to improve teachers’ ability to conduct critical reading teaching in junior high school.Teachers ought to integrate high-level critical reading skills into the teaching objectives;teachers should update their own knowledge and teaching methods;teachers ought to take advantage of teaching organization of group work;teachers should create the problem situations as possible to instruct students to think effectively in problem situations and generate critical thinking.