A Study Of The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking Skills And English Reading Comprehension Competence

Nowadays,with the promulgation of the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017),critical thinking has attracted more and more attention.It clearly states that senior high school English courses are supposed to focus on improving students’ competences to acquire information,process information,analyze problems and solve problems in English based on the further developing students’ comprehensive language ability.All of these elements reflect the importance of critical thinking.Some education experts and teachers are trying different means to cultivate students’ critical thinking in different situations.Meanwhile,playing an essential role in senior high,English reading occupies a large proportion of the examination.Students spend much time on English reading in order to get a higher grade on the examination.Therefore,critical thinking and English reading comprehension are the most imperative skills for senior high students.Based on Facione’s two-dimension structures and Delphi Project,thus the research question of this study are as follows:(1)What are the characteristics of the senior two students’ critical thinking skill?(2)What are the levels of senior two students in the three question types of English reading test?(3)Is there any correlation between senior two students’ critical thinking skill and their performance on English reading comprehension? To what extent do the sub-scales of senior two students’ critical thinking skill correlate with their performance in each reading comprehension category?This research conducts a quantitative method,choosing 116 senior two students from a middle school in Nanchong City as the research participants and collecting data by making use of a questionnaire and English reading test.After data collection,SPSS 25.0 will process the analysis to ensure the objectivity and scientificty of the results.This study mainly uses the descriptive statistical analysis method to understand the overall situation of senior two students’ critical thinking ability and English reading comprehension ability.On this basis,the correlation between the dimensions of critical thinking skill and English reading comprehension scores of senior two students are discussed.It aims to provide meaningful teaching suggestions for the practice of English reading class.The results of this research show that(1)As a whole,senior two students have critical thinking skills and are at an intermediate level.Specific to the dimensions of critical thinking skills,students behave well in three dimensions of interpretation,analysis,and explanation,but perform weakly in dimensions of self-regulation,inference and,evaluation.(2)In general,senior two students’ English reading comprehension is at the middle level.The best performance is the theme topic,followed by the reasoning and judgment,and finally the semantic comprehension.(3)There is a statistically positive relationship between the critical thinking skills of senior two students and their English reading comprehension performance.Specifically,interpretations,inferences,and explanations are significantly and positively correlated with the theme topic question.There is a significant relationship between evaluation and semantic comprehension questions.In addition,analysis is positively correlated with reasoning and judgment questions as well.Finally,based on the above research results,this study provides some meaningful pedagogical implications on how to cultivate students’ critical thinking skills in senior high school English reading teaching,and discusses a few limitations of this study and future research directions,intending to provide some reference for senior high school English reading teaching and subsequent research.