The Effect Of Critical Reading Instruction On Senior High School Students’ English Reading Ability

Reading ability plays a significant role in English language ability.English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools（2017 Edition）points out that through reading,not only can students develop their reading ability,but also can learn language,science and humanities.Besides,teachers can expand students’ thinking and improve their ability of aesthetic,appreciation and evaluation through English reading instruction.Therefore,helping senior high school students to improve their English reading ability is of great importance in current English teaching research.At the same time,the "core literacy" proposed by English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools（2017 Edition）also emphasizes the quality of thinking,which includes students’ logical,critical and innovative thinking and so on.The development of thinking quality helps to improve students’ ability to analyze and solve problems,so that they can observe and understand the world in a cross-cultural perspective and make a correct judgment on things.It can be seen that the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability is of great significance to improve students’ English subject core literacy and reading level.However,in practical teaching,most English teachers overemphasize the importance of language points rather than pay much attention to the deep understanding of the whole text and the cultivation of students’ reading ability.Therefore,it is of great significance to combine critical reading instruction with English reading.This study aims to study the following two questions:（1）What is the effect of critical reading instruction on Senior High School students’ critical thinking?（2）What is the effect of critical reading instruction on Senior High School students’English reading ability?In this study,the author selected 70 students from two parallel classes of Senior 2 in Jiangsu Hongze Senior High School as the participants.One class was the control class（CC）while the other was the experimental class（EC）.The experiment lasted for four-month from September 2020 to December 2020.EC received critical reading instruction for reading teaching,that is,Liu Hui and Wang He’s "Four-step Critical Reading Teaching Model"（Liu Hui＆Wang He,2013）to cultivate students’ reading comprehension ability and critical reading skills,while CC adopted traditional reading instruction.The data obtained from a questionnaire on Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version（CTDI-CV）and reading comprehension tests of EC and CC before and after the experiment were analyzed and processed by Excel and Statistical Package for the Social Science（SPSS）.The main findings are as follows:（1）Critical reading instruction has a positive effect on students’ critical thinking.Before critical reading instruction,there is no significant difference about it.While after four-mouth critical reading instruction,the critical thinking disposition of the students in EC has more advantages over that of students in CC.For EC,after the experiment,only in the dimension of"Truth-seeking",P value is much higher than 0.05,indicating there is no significant improvement.The P values of the other six dimensions and the total score are all far less than 0.05,indicating that the post-experiment results are significantly higher than the pre-experiment results.This shows that the critical thinking ability of students in EC is significantly improved.But for CC only P value of "Inquisitiveness" is less than 0.05,indicating significant differences in the post-experiment result.While the P values of the other dimensions are higher than 0.05,indicating no significant differences in the other six dimensions,which means CC doesn’t have significant improvement in critical thinking.（2）Critical reading instruction can improve students’ English reading ability.Before the experiment,the two classes were tested with English reading comprehension and it was found that there was no significant difference in English reading ability of the students in the two classes.Then,critical reading instruction was integrated into the teaching of English reading in EC.After four-month teaching,the post-test scores of students in EC were higher than those of students in CC,which indicated a great improvement.At the same time,through further analysis,it was found that the difference between EC and CC was the biggest in the questions about"Guessing the Word Meaning".After teaching of the critical reading,students tended to think critically and their English reading ability also improved a lot.I hope this study will draw more teachers9 and students’attention to critical reading,so as to improve students’ thinking level and reading ability.However,in the process of study,due to the limitation of the sample size,the experimental time,the author’s educational background and the research experience,the results need to be further verified.