Research On The Influence Of Thinking Visualization On English Critical Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

The New Curriculum Standards for High School English(Revised Edition 2020)states that the high school English curriculum needs to focus on cultivating students’ ability to learn and use English and promoting students’ critical thinking skills through the integration of learning and use.However,in the current English reading teaching,teachers have neglected the value of English reading in developing students’ critical thinking skills.Yet critical reading provides a good vehicle for developing students’ critical thinking skills.Critical reading is a process in which readers analyze,evaluate,and integrate the ideas in a text to develop critical thinking skills in analysis,reasoning,and speculation.In addition,visualization of thinking,as an auxiliary group tool for developing critical thinking skills in the process of critical reading,presents the logical structure of reading in a visible way.It presents thinking paths with its feature of visualizing thinking paths in order to deepen students’ understanding of the text,which can effectively improve the effectiveness of information processing as well as information transfer,thus enhancing students’ thinking efficiency and ultimately improving critical thinking skills.Therefore,in order to give full play to the value of critical English reading in developing students’ critical thinking skills,the author combines critical thinking,reading,and thinking visualization.Based on previous research,this paper explores the following two questions:(1)How does the use of thinking visualization in teaching critical reading in high school English affect students’ English reading performance?(2)Does the use of thinking visualization in the teaching of critical reading in English in senior secondary schools have any effect on students’ critical thinking skills? If so,which aspect of critical thinking has the most significant impact?The study will last for one semester and will be conducted with students from two parallel classes of senior high school in Nanchong;one experimental class and one control class.At the end of the experiment,the author will collect and analyse data using the data analysis tool SPSS 22.0as well as Excel tables to analyse the impact of thinking visualization on the teaching of critical reading in English in high school.The results of the reading tests,scales and questionnaires show that the combination of thinking visualization and critical reading in high school English made a difference to students’ reading performance as well as their critical thinking skills.Firstly,the analysis of students’ reading test scores revealed that thinking visualization had a positive impact on students’ reading performance.The analysis of the pre and post tests for the control and experimental classes revealed that there was no significant change in the pre and post test scores for the control class,while the post test scores for the experimental class were significantly better than the pre test scores.Secondly,the analysis of the scales revealed that the mean scores on all dimensions of critical thinking in the experimental class during the post-test period in the teaching of critical reading in high school English showed significant increases.Thus,the use of thinking visualization also had a positive impact on students’ critical thinking skills and was most significant in improving students’ critical thinking skills in the areas of conjecture,interpretation and analysis.Thirdly,the analysis of the students’ questionnaires revealed that after a semester of teaching critical reading,most of the students knew the meaning of critical reading,but there were still many students with insufficient critical thinking skills,which also reflected that there were still some shortcomings in certain aspects of this study and further improvement was needed.