A Effectiveness Study Of Training In Critical Thinking And College English Reading Achievement

Critical thinking (CT) is considered as a vital thinking ability in many fields, such as philosophy, psychology and education. Researchers from various fields focus on different aspects of critical thinking, which can be called'letting a hundred schools of thought contend'. However, in the field of second language acquisition, especially the second language reading comprehension, there are few researches about critical thinking.This dissertation is to investigate the effects of critical thinking training on critical thinking level and the effects of the changing in critical thinking level on students'reading achievement. The experiment lasts for 16 weeks, which is designed to find out the effectiveness between critical thinking and college English reading achievements of Chinese first-year non-English majors. SPSS is used in the experiment to analysis the raw materials. The statistical techniques employed for analysis are Descriptive Statistics, Independent Sample T-test, Paired Sample T-test and Pearson Correlational Analysis, aiming to find out: 1) the differences of students'critical thinking and reading comprehension before and after the experiment; 2) the effect of critical thinking on reading achievement; 3) the effectiveness between critical thinking training and reading achievement. The dissertation gets the following conclusion:1) After one term's critical thinking training, Subjects'critical thinking ability improved;2) the improvement in critical thinking skills lead to the improvement of reading comprehension;3) Subjects with different reading achievements represent different critical thinking ability after the experiment. The effective learners employ the skill of self-regulation more often than the ineffective learners.Based on the above research, some pedagogical implications have been made for the teachers on the teaching activities of first-year non-English majors. Teachers can employ teacher-model to enrich the contents and skills of critical thinking by the means of explaining, modeling, and excising, which will make students actively taking advantage of critical thinking to improve reading comprehension.