A Correlation Study On The Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking Disposition And Their English Reading Comprehension Ability

The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)proposed to cultivate students’ core competences of English,including the improvement of thinking quality and the development of critical thinking ability.Constructing critical English reading teaching is of great benefit to the improvement of students’ English reading ability and critical thinking ability.Critical thinking disposition is the psychological basis of critical thinking ability.Therefore,this study is dedicated to the exploration of the relationship between senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and their English reading comprehension ability,aiming to provide some suggestions for constructing critical English reading teaching in senior high school.This study adopts the critical thinking disposition questionnaire and English reading comprehension test to collect research subjects’ relevant data.The study has197 senior high school students as the research subjects from a high school in Huaibei,Anhui Province.SPSS 22.0 is used to analyze the data to explore senior high school students’ current situation of critical thinking disposition,English reading comprehension ability and the correlation between them.Three research questions in this study are:(1)What is the current situation of high school students’ critical thinking disposition?(2)What is the performance of senior high school students’ English reading comprehension ability?(3)What is the correlation between senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and their English reading comprehension ability? Which dimensions are predictive of students’ English reading comprehension ability?The findings of the study are as follows:(1)Senior high school students’ overall critical thinking disposition is positive.From high scores to low,eight dimensions of critical thinking disposition are justice-orientedness,open-mindedness,cognitive maturity,truth-seeking,inquisitiveness,analyticity,systematicity and self-confidence.Except systematicity and self-confidence,the other six dimensions are positive disposition.(2)The senior high school students’ reading comprehension ability is above average,but there is a relatively wide ability gap between them.Specifically,students’ performance at grasping details is the best,followed by word meaning guessing,reasoning and judgment,and theme summarization the poorest.(3)There is a positive correlation between senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and their English reading comprehension ability.Among eight dimensions of senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition,open-mindedness,cognitive maturity,truth-seeking,inquisitiveness and analyticity are positively correlated with English reading comprehension and its four question types,but there is no statistically significant correlation between justice-orientedness,systematicity,self-confidence and English reading comprehension ability;among the significantly correlated dimensions,cognitive maturity and truth-seeking have a predictive effect on English reading comprehension ability.Based on the above research results,this paper puts forward some suggestions on how to create critical English reading teaching and cultivate students’ positive critical thinking disposition,hoping to provide enlightenment for senior high school English reading teaching and reference for later research.