An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Critical Reading Teaching On Junior High School Students’ Use Of English Reading Strategies And Ability

Critical reading teaching offers numerous advantages over traditional reading teaching,and there have been many experimental studies on critical reading teaching in China in recent years,but few junior high school students have been the study subjects.As junior high school students’ thinking and ability development is at a key stage,this study attempts to conduct critical reading teaching research in junior high school English reading classrooms.Based on constructivist learning theory and critical discourse analysis,this study creates a critical reading teaching mode appropriate for junior high school students and investigates its teaching effect through teaching experiments.This study addresses the following research questions:(1)Does critical reading teaching affect the use of critical reading strategies by junior high school students? If yes,how does the impact differ for different strategies?(2)Does critical reading teaching affect junior high school students’ English critical reading ability? If yes,what are the specific aspects?The subjects of this research were 98 students from two third-grade classes at a junior high school in Guangzhou,with the experimental class studying critical reading teaching strategies before the experiment and implementing critical reading teaching in the English reading class,while the control class remained with the initial traditional reading teaching mode.The study used SPSS26.0 to analyze and evaluate the acquired data after 12 weeks of teaching experiments.The experimental results suggested that:(1)Critical reading teaching could enhance the frequency with which students use most English critical reading strategies,but it had no meaningful effect on the frequency with which students employ questioning strategies.(2)Critical reading education could improve students’ English critical reading ability,and the ability to infer and assess these two dimensions had been greatly improved,since in the setting of traditional reading teaching,students’ analytical ability had been developed to a certain level,and the analytical ability affected the experiment changes little.In conclusion,the study feels that incorporating critical reading abilities into junior high school English reading courses has practical implications.However,various limitations of this study,such as the scope of research objects and experimental duration,must be addressed in the future practice of critical reading teaching.