A Study On Application Of KWL Teaching Model In Cultivating Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking In English Writing Teaching

New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(published in 2017,revised in 2020)focuses more on the cultivation of critical thinking.Writing and critical thinking are indispensable.Writing an essay needs critical thinking to process and organize information and viewpoints.Also,an essay is a reflection of one’s critical thinking.However,most students only imitate others’ writing,because they regard writing as homework or a task.Therefore,problems like lacking of logic,misunderstanding,word for word translation happen a lot.Under the guidance of the new curriculum standards,it’s vital to introduce and use novel teaching strategies in English lessons in order to foster students’ critical thinking.In 1986,based on schema theory and constructivism,American scholar Ogle put forward student-centered KWL(Know-Want-Learn)teaching model.“K” refers to “What we know”,which means what students know about the new topic.“W” means “What we want to know”.In this step,students can raise additional questions about the topic that they are interested in.“L” stands for “What we have learned”,which allows students to sum up the knowledge they learned in this period.There are few Chinese scholars who apply KWL teaching model to English writing teaching.Furthermore,the improvement of writing ability is proved by the changes in students’ writing scores.Writing ability has a strong link with critical thinking.Therefore,this thesis attempts to integrate KWL teaching model into English writing class to study senior high school students’ critical thinking from the perspective of critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills.The participants are 47 students who come from a senior 1 class in a senior high school of Fuzhou.This research lasts for 4 months or so.Research instruments are the Chinese version of California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CTDI-CV),the revised Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills(UF/QCTS)and three writing tests.There are two research questions:(1)Can KWL teaching model improve senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition? If so,what sub-dispositions have been improved significantly?(2)Can KWL teaching model improve senior high school students’ critical thinking skills? If so,what sub-skills have been improved significantly?With the help of SPSS 20.0,the author collected and analyzed the data.The major findings are as follows:(1)KWL teaching model can improve students’ critical thinking disposition.Seven sub-dispositions gain improvements to some degree.They are truth-seeking,self-confidence,inquisitiveness,open-mindedness,systematicity,maturity,analyticity from highest to lowest;(2)KWL teaching model can improve students’ critical thinking skills.The improvements of five sub-skills rank in order of interpretation,explanation,inference,evaluation,analysis respectively.In conclusion,this research verifies KWL teaching model has a positive effect on the improvements of senior high school students’ critical thinking and proposes some pedagogical implications according to the main findings.Meanwhile,there are some limitations of this research.In view of this,the author makes some suggestions for future study.