A Study Of Cultivating Senior Pupils’ English Critical Thinking Skills Based On Teacher-student Interaction

Cultivating students’ critical thinking skills is one of the most essential requirements of their core competencies development.English Curriculum Standard for High School 2017 version has a clear definition for English core competencies,since when,English critical thinking skills have become a highlight of students’ thinking qualities.It brings a lot of benefits to sharpen students’ English critical thinking skills,which not only can enhance students’ English language skills but also fill a thinking gap caused by one single language and extend a helping hand to make students become overall thinkers who acquaint themselves with the world in multiple-angle visions.However in China,it seems not so promising to carry out the English critical thinking education in reality.Up to now,only a few universities have integrated the critical thinking skills into English courses,and rare cases in elementary or high schools,thus the deficiency of students’ English critical thinking has been rooted in their early elementary education.As a consequence educators must make more researches on pupils’ English critical thinking skills,which will lay a solid foundation for further improvement of students’ English critical thinking afterwards.On the basis of social-cultural theory and deep-learning theory,this paper conducts action research through class observation and tests in Class 1,Grade 5 from O primary school,trying to figure out features and current status of English critical thinking skills for senior pupils,training strategies for pupils’ English critical thinking skills development in the horizon of teacher-student interaction and their availability.With the analysis of relevant researches,this study sorts out that the features of pupils’ English critical thinking skills chiefly focus on analyzing,inferring,argumentation,evaluation and regulation.Combining with the results of three-round action research,the researcher has drawn a conclusion that proper teacher-student interaction strategies truly exert positive influences on promoting students’ English critical thinking skills.Furthermore,five effective strategies have been proposed to cultivate pupils’ English critical thinking skills by teacher-student interactions: enrich teaching materials and choose a proper interactive topic;optimize the classroom questioning for deep thinking;refine teachers’ feedback and evaluation methods;create a conversational classroom discourse environment and last but not least,design integrated learning activities to enhance students’ deep learning.It is hoped that through this study,the cultivation of pupils’ English critical thinking skills can be effectively implemented in the process of future teaching practice.