A Survey On The Current Situation Of Thinking Abilities In English Story Teaching Of Primary School Students

The development of students’ thinking abilities is nowadays one of the important objectives of the core competence frameworks at home and abroad.Language and thinking are closely related and can prompt the development of each other.English classes,through which Chinese students mainly learn English also undertakes the significant role of developing students’ thinking abilities.The curriculum reform aims at the cultivation of thinking abilities,but the daily teaching practice is far from perfect.Meanwhile,the research about thinking abilities at home still in the phase of exploring and developing,which hasn’t combined the research on primary school story teaching traits remains undeveloped.That is why this research emphasizes on the current situation of thinking abilities in English story teaching of primary school,trying to make a little contribution to the research on cultivating thinking abilities through story teaching,to explore the rules,characteristics and routes of cultivating thinking abilities through story teaching and to help teachers improve English curriculum teaching reform instructions.Guided by Piaget’s cognitive development theory,Long and Sato’s question types’ division,Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and the correlated theories,this investigation adopts classroom observation and interview methods,chooses 4 teachers in a primary school in Shanghai and their classes as research objects and focuses on the current situation of thinking abilities in English story teaching of primary school,which contains teachers’ understanding of cultivating thinking abilities by story teaching,the circumstances of how classroom teaching questions and activities cultivate students’ thinking abilities and the difficulties and challenges teachers meet.Research findings indicate that 1)teachers generally agree on the importance and feasibility of cultivating thinking abilities in story teaching classes.However,they lack the understanding about thinking abilities,the reasons of their importance and their cultivating methods.2)Teachers don’t do well in cultivating students’ thinking abilities through story teaching.Teachers’ questions are more display questions,referring to lower thinking levels and are distributed unevenly.Teachers’ activities of cultivating thinking abilities are distributed unevenly in types,with lower thinking level activities at most.3)Teachers meet several difficulties and big challenges in cultivating thinking abilities in story teaching.Aiming at tackling these thorny problems,this study gives suggestions from strengthening theoretical learning and teachers’ training,providing resource and environmental support,teaching according to children’s thinking development,setting more referential questions,balancing the questions’ thinking levels and their distribution,enriching the types and thinking levels of the thinking ability cultivating activities,improving their distribution,analyzing story genres and texts deeply and exploiting attitudes and values.