An Experimental Study Of English Critical Reading Teaching Model In Senior High School

Critical reading plays an important role in cultivating the students’ innovative spirit and creative ability. Critical reading refers to "the deep understanding of the text content, including the skills of interpretation and evaluation. It helps readers to distinguish important information and unimportant information, distinguish ideas and facts, and determine the attitude and purpose of the author. At the same time, students should deduce the author’s implication through inference and judgment and ultimately arrive at a logical conclusion"(Pirozzi, 2003:225).Critical reading is a high level of reading activities, which need readers use prediction, analysis, inference, evaluation, and summary or any other ways of thinking to get the deeper understanding of the content of the text, and improve the comprehensive ability of using language(Zhang Chun,2009:66-69).The ordinary senior high school English curriculum standard(experiment) made clear that critical reading conforms to the requirements of the new curriculum standard, and it contributes to the cultivation of critical thinking in the teaching goal. However, through investigation and study we found that senior high school students lack the ability of critical reading.Bosley(2008) mentions that teachers in many senior high schools often teach students how to conduct receptive reading and how to obtain information in the reading. Many new students have not learned to read actively or read critically, let alone constructing knowledge while reading. Zhang Chun(2009) points out that in senior high school most teachers focus on explaining the new words and students can only understand the text in the form of shallow reading.Reading skills still stays on the simple level. Scholars and teachers should pay much attention to the situation in which senior high school students lack of critical reading.The teachers should have the consciousness to guide students do critical reading and teach them critical reading strategies.This research, based on constructivism theory and critical discourse analysis theory, uses teaching experiment method to investigate the following three questions.1) Does critical reading teaching model improve senior high school students’ consciousness of using critical reading strategies? 2) Does critical reading teaching model improve students’ reading ability, including inferential ability and analytical ability)? 3) Does critical reading teaching model improve students’ satisfaction in reading teaching and the interest in English? This teaching experiment lasted one term. Two parallel classes in Jizhou senior high school are the experimental objects. The experimental class develops critical reading teaching model, and the control class will continue to use the original pattern of reading teaching. The author adopts questionnaire, reading ability test and interview method to collect data, and adopt SPSS13.0 to analyze the collected data. The experimental results show that: 1) critical reading teaching model can improve senior high school students’ consciousness of using reading strategies; 2) critical reading teaching model can improve the students’ overall reading ability, in which the improvement of inferential ability is better than that of analytical ability; 3) through critical reading teaching, students’ satisfaction in reading teaching and the interest in English study improve largely.