Empirical Study Of Appraisal Theory In The Teaching Of College English Critical Reading

Innovation is the spirit of a nation. Many scholars believe that one of the mostimportant components of innovation is creative thinking and critical thinking. As forcritical thinking, critical reading is a significant way to cultivate critical thinkingability in reading teaching from the perspective of cultivation. The so-called criticalreading is not readers’ passive acceptance or memory of the text message andknowledge, but the readers’ focus on the author’s values, position and evaluation ofthe discourse based on the reader’s individual ideology and experience. AppraisalTheory precisely focuses on the evaluative resources of the discourse, which reflectthe consistency of Appraisal Theory and critical reading. However, at present thenumber of domestic related literature about critical English reading teaching is verylimited, the single research subjects and disproportion of research types. On balance,the empirical research is still at a groping stage.This thesis tries to apply Appraisal Theory to critical reading of college Englishteaching, so as to dig new areas of application of Appraisal Theory, explore the waysand methods to promote the critical reading ability of college students, and to provethe validity of this application through experiments.The author carried out the experimental teaching for16weeks in the first half of2013in Henan Agricultural University. In this thesis60students were selected asexperimental subjects and they were randomly divided into two groups, one wasexperimental group (EG) and the other was the control group (CG). The two groupswere treated in two different ways in16weeks. The EG was treated in a criticalreading teaching mode based on Appraisal Theory while the CG was treated in acritical reading teaching mode(three steps). The research data were from criticalreading ability tests, interviews of some students and Henan Agricultural UniversityOnline Teaching Evaluation System. At last, the SPSS software was applied to datastatistics and calculation, as well as a detailed data discussion and analysis. Theresults of an independent Samples T-test of the Pre-test between the Control Groupand Experiment Group mean there is no significant difference between two groups inthe Pre-test; the results of an independent Samples T-test of the Post-test between theControl Group and Experiment Group indicate there is significant difference betweentwo groups in the Posttest; the result of a Paired Samples T-test between the Pretest and Posttest of Experiment Group indicates there is significant difference, while thesimilar test of Control Group shows there is no significant difference.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study could draw the followingconclusions: firstly, the students’ critical reading ability on the whole was still weakaccording to critical reading tests. Second, the critical reading teaching mode based onAppraisal Theory is beneficial to improving the students’ critical reading ability.