An Action Research On Cultivating Critical Thinking In Senior High School English Reading Lessons

With the development of society and the reform of new curriculum,critical thinking has become the focus of talent training in China.In view of the inseparable relationship between thinking and language,reading,as one of the basic skills of English language learning and an important form of language input,can not only enhance students’ sense of English language,but also cultivate students’ problem-solving ability.Therefore,in the process of cultivating students’ critical thinking,reading teaching plays an important role in the language learning.In terms of the fact that most domestic researches focus on higher education,this study takes senior high school students as the research object,aiming to cultivate and develop students’ critical thinking through English reading teaching based on critical thinking.The implementation of the study is mainly based on two theories: Schema Theory and Constructivism Theory,and attempts to explore the teaching of English reading in high school from the problems existing in the process of English reading teaching,so as to achieve the goal of cultivating students’ critical thinking.The purpose of this paper is to implement the following questions:1.How to cultivate students’ critical thinking in high school English reading class?2.After action research,what are the changes in students’ critical thinking?This research conducted four-month action research on Class Three,Grade Ten in a high school in Liaoning Province.Two methods were used,namely interview and test,and SPSS software was used to collect and process the data.Before the action research,the researchers understood the current status of students’ critical thinking and the students’ English reading level firstly.After the action research,the collected data were sorted out and analyzed through SPSS.According to the two rounds of data collection and analysis,we can draw the following conclusions:Through the training of critical thinking skills in reading teaching,students are more willing to think and explore actively,and their overall critical thinking ability has been improved.The research has proved that the combination of critical thinking training and English reading teaching can change students’ way of thinking and improve their reading performance,which is an effective way to cultivate students’ critical thinking.