A Study On Critical Thinking Ability Cultivation Based On The Application Of DRTA Strategy In Senior High School English Reading Instruction

The general senior high school English curriculum standards revised in 2020 proposed that the selection of the course content would be around the implementation of core literacy.And the importance of critical thinking ability,as a part of the core literacy,is to be attached.But in actual high school teaching process,teachers often focus on answering problems in reading exercises and explaining language points in reading.In the long term development,it will make students learn knowledge mechanically,lose interest in reading,and their critical thinking ability cannot be improved effectively.Directed Reading Thinking Activity(DRTA)realizes an inquiry-based teaching mode that emphasizes teacher’s guidance and student’s autonomous exploration by observation,thinking,prediction,questioning and verification,which provides new ideas for the cultivation of critical thinking ability in English reading teaching.This paper explored the effect of application of DRTA strategy to English reading teaching and tried to answer two questions: 1.What is the effect of DRTA strategy on students’ critical thinking ability? 2.What is the influence of DRTA strategy on students’ English reading ability?This research selected two classes of grade 1 in Handan Middle School of Hebei Province as the control class and the experiment class,with 55 students in each class.The control class adopted the traditional task-based language teaching method to teach reading,while the experiment class adopted the DRTA strategy to teach reading materials.The research tools of this study include reading tests,critical thinking tests and interview,and SPSS.26 was used to analyze the collected data.The results were that: 1.in terms of students’ critical thinking ability,both of their critical thinking skills were at a low level before experiment and they didn’t have obvious significance.After the experiment,the critical thinking skills in control class remained basically unchanged,while critical tendency scores of the students in the experiment class increased by 30.61 points,and the critical thinking skills scores increased by 3.09 points.The SPSS analysis results of these two items illustrated the critical ability of students in experiment class improved obviously;2.as far as students’ English reading ability was concerned,the reading test score of students in control class between before and after the experiment had no significant difference.After the experiment,the reading test score of students in experiment class improved2.09 points,and SPSS analysis result showed these two groups was significant different.Therefore,the effect of the application DRTA strategy to English reading in high school is remarkable and it worth spreading and application.