A Study Of The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking In The English Reading Class For The Minority Ethnic Group Preparatory College Students

The goal and direction of Chinese education in21st Century has seen a big change with the development of society. The teaching mode of teacher-centered classroom is slowly being changed to the teaching mode of active learning, questioning and thinking of the students. Students are encouraged to ask questions, discuss issues, share their ideas in class which is because the students are the masters of the classroom, the main role in learning and thinking and people who really need to exercise. Therefore, to cultivate students’ thinking, to let the students learn to think actively are considered to be the primary task of current education. With the main direction of cultivating students’ thinking ability, this paper is mainly about the of cultivation of critical thinking of minority ethnic group preparatory college students in the reading class which is thought to focus on the ability of analysis, reasoning, judgment and creation, and to see the critical reading’s effect in improving students’ reading comprehension ability.In order to be able to understand the function of reading strategy to the students, this paper adopted the method of teaching experiment, data analysis and drawing a conclusion.First of all, for the consideration of fairness in the experimental,60students of the school of minority ethnic education of Nanchang Institute of Science and Technology are selected as the experimental objects according to their English achievements in the baseline examinations.Then, in order to understand the Critical Thinking disposition of of these60students, Peng Meici et al’s CTDI-CV is adopted to investigate the60students in the form of questionnaire survey with a total score of350. It is informed that critical thinking disposition of the60Ethnic Minority Students are weak with the average score of214.6and209.5. The lowest score can be seen in the elements of open-mindedness, analyticity and systemacity,which is largely due to their ethnic minorities living environment, the more traditional and conservative conceptions and the backward education mode. However, the scores are higher in the elements of truth-seeking, inquisitiveness, cognitive maturity and CT confidence but scores, which also proves that minority students have a strong desire for learning, are curious and a confidence to change their learning situation.which also lays the good foundation for the next step of the experiment.Then, two kinds of different teaching methods for the two classes are adopted. The controlled class is still taught with the traditional English reading teaching method which is mainly about the words teaching, analysis of sentence structure and the translation of the text, and the experimental class is experimented with critical reading teaching method which is to help students master the basic knowledge of the language and to teach students to analyze the structure of the article, the tone, feelings, and to deduce the writing purpose, to sum up the main idea,and let the students write reading notes. In the early stage of the two teaching, middle and late stage,3reading quizzes and2writing tasks are arranged with the purpose of knowing the level of reading and writing ability of the two groups of students and the changes, especially the students in the experimental class before,during and after accepting the critical reading teaching.And the results of the3reading performance and the2writing performance of the experimental class and the controlled class will be analyzed by the software of SPSS19.0. The results of the pretest shows that there in no difference between two classes in grade the reading and the writing ability,but through1semester of teaching, compared with results of the pre-reading test, the grades of the experimental class improved more obviously by4.4points from the score of8.8points to13.2points, and the scores of pre-writing improves by3.4from8.9to12.3. While the scores of reading of the controlled class improved just by1.8from9.6to11.4,and the writing scores increased only by0.3.from9.3to9.6. Thus, the critical reading teaching generates positive transfer on the students’reading comprehension and writing ability,Finally, in order to understand the students real attitude for their acceptance of reading teaching,60students were interviewed and the teaching-assessing system given by the60students for teaching evaluation are all checked. From the results of the interview and evaluation of teaching, students in the experimental class show a positive attitude to the teaching method for their thinking is extended, and the problems are considered more comprehensively and deeply, and they have learnt to summarize, analyze, infer, explain and appreciate the English reading and regard it a fun, while the attitude of the control class are different from the students of the experimental class by telling that they adapt to the traditional teaching method, but they feel English reading boring and the central ideas of some difficult articles are hard to understand,and showing little interest in English reading.From the research and teaching of a semester,it can be seen that affected by their living environment and the traditional conceptions before entering the preparatory education, they are not open-minded and show a weakness in analysis and systematicity but after the teacher’s guidance and a period of critical thinking teaching training, they critical thinking can be improved increasingly and the CT teaching is suitable for them. In the meantime, it reminds that as ethnic preparatory education teachers, the teachers should possess the critical thinking skills and dispositions before cultivating a critical thinking on the students.