Critical Newspaper Reading In Support Of Critical Thinking

The aim of the present study was to examine critical thinking abilities about English newspaper reading among English majors in a newspaper-reading course at a local university. In this study, I posit that CDA should be combined with the theory of critical thinking and place an emphasis on the formation of CT. The present study attempts to initiate a critical project to cultivate in Chinese EFL students the ability and disposition to think critically by critically reading English newspaper texts. The focus of this study is not on how actually we can"emancipate"and change the world, but on how we can gain an insight into social and political affairs and substantiate a growth of criticality of our mind through the processes of critical text reading.The research study mainly adopted qualitative methods. As Savage (1998) pointed out, critical thinking is unpredictable and hard to evaluate by objective tests, this study also determined that quantitative measures could not adequately describe or interpret the whole situation. From the data gathered from personal interviews with students, observations of newspaper reading classes, and the students'self-evaluation, it was possible to learn about the contribution of the CDA key concepts and its special learning environment characteristics to promoting students'thinking abilities.The research comes to several conclusions. Firstly, by incorporating a CDA and critical reading approach to the newspaper-reading course, teachers can have a positive influence on promoting students'critical language awareness conducive to critical thinking. Secondly, it remains a major target for any EFL class to constantly improve students'language skills and communicative competence, which is also an essential ability involving critical thinking. Thirdly, critical reading is social as well as personal in that it involves critical thinking and evaluation, and negotiations around texts as well.