A Study On Critical Thinking And English Reading Teaching

Critical Thinking (CT), one of the hottest issues in the educational circle(s) at home and abroad, plays a really important role in the intellectual development of students. It is also very essential to cultivate students' creative spirit and innovational competence. In China, however, traditional English teaching merely attaches emphasis to training students' linguistic knowledge and language skills. There exists a 'vacancy' in the cultivation of students' CT in English teaching in China.Given that reading is an important way for people to obtain various kinds of information and knowledge, English reading course has long been an attention-getting program in China's English teaching. However, examining the present English reading teaching for English majors in our country, one will find out that students are often trained to take in the viewpoints or ideas presented in a text. As a result, they will just accept the information of a reading text without any analyzing, questioning, distinguishing or criticizing rather than put forward ideas or points of view of their own while reading. This kind of one-fold receiving English reading teaching to a great extent restrains the development of CT and creative thinking of students, which in effect hinders the all-round development of students' learning competence.Hence, this paper begins with the definitions of CT and Critical Reading (CR). Then, it describes the educational researches and the related theories of CT and CR at home and abroad, analyzes the reasons for the lack of CT in China's EFL (English as Foreign Language) teaching, and points out the necessity and practicability of implementing Critical Reading Teaching (CRT) in English reading teaching so as to foster students' CT and evaluative and appreciative competence.Based on the researches on CR at home and abroad, and with the aim of exploring a more practical teaching mode for English reading teaching, the author makes a further probe into the practice of carrying out CRT in her classroom. The hypotheses put forward are as follows: 1) Compared with the traditional English reading teaching, CRT helps improve students' reading comprehension ability more efficiently; 2) CRT has a positive transfer effect on students' English writing. After one academic year of teaching practice and observation, it is found that CRT conduces to improving students' reading comprehension ability more efficiently and significantly than the traditional English reading teaching does, and that CRT has a positive transfer effect on students' English writing. What's more, data collected from both the interviews conducted by the author and the Teaching-Assessment System indicate that students as a whole show positive attitudes towards CRT.Therefore, Research and practice undertaken by the author proves that CRT is not only a practical and important way to cultivate English majors' CT but also helps improve students' reading comprehension ability and evaluative and appreciative competence more efficiently than the traditional English reading teaching. It should be popularized among EFL teachers and deserves further study.