An Empirical Study On Critical Thinking In English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

English reading actually reflects the readers’ process of accepting the text which requires readers to interact with the text and the author actively.During the reading process,readers recreate the text by taking into account their cognition,feelings,experiences and understandings of the text.Therefore,a complete reading process should include both comprehensive reading and critical reading.From the present studies,the empirical researches of critical thinking in English reading teaching mainly adopted university or high school students as research subjects.Few of them are concerned with junior high school students.However,critical reading teaching in junior high schools indeed meets the requirements of the core literacy of the English subject.Hence,this thesis attempts to apply critical reading to junior high school English reading teaching by using questionnaires,reading tests and interviews as research tools.This study conducted a four-month teaching experiment in a junior high school in Foshan.There were 80 participants altogether selected from two parallel classes in Grade Eight.Class 5 was the experimental class that adopted critical reading teaching method while Class 1 was the controlled class which used traditional reading teaching method.This research aims to explore the following two research questions:1)What effects does critical reading teaching have on students’ reading ability in junior high school?2)How well do the students recognize critical thinking in English reading teaching?On analyzing the research data,the major findings of this study are as follows:1)Critical reading teaching enhanced junior high school students’ English reading ability.The test scores before the experiment showed that the reading scores of the students from the experimental class(26.20)and the controlled class(25.95)were equivalent,and there was no significant difference(p=0.843>0.05).After four months of a teaching experiment,the reading scores of the students in the experimental class(29.20)were significantly higher than that of the students in the controlled class(26.30)and there was a significant difference(0.017<0.05).2)Students in the experimental class were more interested in reading and they preferred critical reading teaching.In the survey,90% of students felt more interested in English reading,and 82.5% wanted to learn more about critical thinking.Critical reading teaching had a positive impact on students,especially on their expression and thinking.Based on the findings of this study,some suggestions are put forward for junior high school English teachers.1)Teachers should not confine themselves to English textbooks when designing reading teaching.They can appropriately supplement some time-effective,interesting and critical articles which are connected with students’ daily life.2)Critical reading teaching requires a relaxing and active learning atmosphere so teachers should not control the class absolutely.As an organizer,the teacher should arrange more discussion activities for students.3)Teachers should pay more attention to the variety of questions and the quality of thinking when designing questions.4)Teachers should focus more on text analysis because not all the reading articles are appropriate for critical reading teaching.