An Empirical Study Of Critical English Reading Teaching On Senior Middle School Students

In China, high school English teaching lacks of listening and speaking context. For EFL senior high school students, reading can be the best way to increase their language input and improve their English proficiency. However, English reading teaching in high school is far from satisfaction, and most students hold a negative attitude towards the passive teaching mode. Critical reading is a high-level reading activity, which can arouse students’initiative, enhance their critical reading proficiency and foster their critical thinking ability. Conducting critical reading teaching in China can not only contribute to students’reading proficiency, but also fully meet the requirement of the New Curriculum Standard.Based on constructive reading theory, schema theory and meta-cognitive strategy theory, this paper adopts document analysis method, quantitative and qualitative research method, aiming at figuring out whether conducting critical reading teaching in high school is conducive to improve students’frequency of reading strategy use, enhance their reading ability, their satisfaction towards English reading teaching and their interest towards English learning.This instructional experiment lasts for15weeks, and two classes in Grade1in Fuzhou Hua Qiao Middle School are regarded as the subjects. One is EG in which critical reading teaching is conducted, and another is CG in which the original teaching method is adopted. Questionnaires, reading tests and interviews are adopted to collect the statistics which are later analyzed by SPSS16.0. The major findings are shown as follows.1) CRT (Critical Reading Teaching) is conducive to improve students’frequency of reading strategy use;2) CRT is more efficient to enhance students’reading ability, of which the improvement of their inference ability is more significant than the analysis ability;3) CRT can help improve students’satisfaction towards English reading teaching and their interest towards English learning.In a word, the author believes that practicing CRT in senior high school is feasible and can provide useful reference for CRT both in theory and in practice.