The Effect Of Critical Reading Instruction On Reading Proficiency Of Senior High School Students

It is clearly required in General Senior High School Curriculum Standards(2020 Edition)that students grasp reading strategies and skills mainly instantiated by predicting textual contents,retrieving the main idea and detecting the author’s intention.Predicting,retrieving and detecting belong to the category of critical reading strategies,through which students are expected to improve their integrative abilities of language use.However,the present English reading instruction in senior high school attaches too much importance to language knowledge,surface level of reading comprehension and a deeper level of interpreting texts from a critical perspective has mostly been ignored.The problem thus arises for urgent handling how the reading instruction can be reversed back to its normal nature so that the quality standard can be truly implemented in senior high school.The present research attempts to incorporate the idea of critical reading strategies into English reading instruction in senior high school,basing itself on the theory of constructivism,the critical approach to text analysis and Bloom’s taxonomy to educational goals and making reference to the reading proficiency defined in the Reading Scale of China’s Standards of English and the framework of critical thinking proposed by Flynn.Specifically,it aims to answer the following two research questions.(1)To what extent does critical reading instruction affect the critical reading strategies used by senior high school students?(2)To what extent does critical reading instruction affect the reading cognitive competence displayed among senior high school students?In addressing the above-mentioned two questions,the present research conducts an 16-week experimental study,the subjects being 100 students from two natural classes in Grade One in a high school in Yueyang.In it the instruments of reading test papers,questionnaires and interviews are used to collect data and SPSS 27.0 is used to do statistical analysis of the relevant data.It is found through the study critical reading instruction had a positive effect on the frequency of the students’ use of critical reading strategies and their reading cognitive competence.Specifically,(1)Students in the experimental class raised their awareness of using critical reading strategies,with more significant changes in preview and prediction,annotation,self-regulation and analysis strategies and slighter changes in inference,summarization,evaluation and questioning strategies.(2)Students in the experimental class showed an overall increase in their English reading proficiency.Middle-level students showed greater improvement while high and low-level students showed less improvement.The research findings suggest that critical reading instruction contributes to improving the reading proficiency of the students,and the fruitful practice of incorporating critical thinking into reading instruction hopefully will offer a new mindset to teaching reform in senior high school English reading instruction.