An Experimental Study On Critical Reading Teaching Model At College Level

The 21 st century is commonly known as the era of information explosion, in which mass information floods into people’s mind. To quickly get useful information in limited time, it is necessary for us to apply critical thinking to analyze and evaluate the information, and finally make reasonable judgments and decisions. Therefore, the cultivation of critical thinking ability has become one of the most important goals in education. Based on the idea of critical thinking, great attention has been paid to critical reading in recent years.Critical reading(CR) is a crucial way to cultivate people’s critical thinking ability. CR is a high-level reading activity, which emphasizes readers’ active involvement in reading. Based on the text interpretation, the readers should pay more attention to analyzing, judging and evaluating authors’ viewpoints, writing purpose and tone, and process of argumentation, etc., aiming to construct their own understanding and views on what they read.College English teaching is an integral part of higher education and the curriculum also puts forward requirements for the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability. However, the current situation of college English reading teaching is far from satisfactory. Teachers put too much emphasis on the training of language knowledge and skills but neglect the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability, which results in students’ lack of interest and poor achievements in reading. Therefore, based on the relevant theories of critical reading, this thesis attempts to conduct critical reading teaching model in which students are the center of the class, with teachers as guiders, and critical reading strategies are incorporated into the three stages of reading teaching: pre-reading, while reading and post-reading, hoping to improve students’ reading level and cultivate their critical reading ability and critical thinking ability.To verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the critical reading teaching(CRT), an instructional experiment is conducted. The experiment lasted for 16 weeks, with two parallel classes of Pre-school Education in Hengshui University as experimental subjects, a total of 102 students. One is experimental group, in which critical reading teaching model is adopted, and the other is control group, which is still taught by the traditional way of reading teaching. Questionnaires and reading test papers are used to collect data, which is analyzed by SPSS17.0. The results show that CRT is more conducive to enhancing students’ frequency and awareness of using critical reading strategies, that it is more effective in improving students’ English reading ability, and that students’ reading interest is aroused and they are more content with CRT.Therefore, the results further verify the effectiveness of critical reading teaching of college English, which provides reference for CRT’s popularization and further study. It is hoped that CRT can provoke more study and discussion so as to improve students’ reading ability and their critical thinking ability.