An Empirical Research Of Critical Reading Strategies Teaching In Senior High School English Class

The new curriculum criteria put forward concrete stipulations on the development of high school students’ critical thinking ability. However, there are still some obstacles to the development of the students’ critical thinking in the teaching of reading course offered in high schools.In order to explore the effective ways to train the students’ critical thinking skills in English reading class of senior high school, this research integrates the theories and the empirical researches on critical reading made at home and abroad, and carries out the critical reading strategies instruction experiment, following well designed substantial teaching process, thereafter, data analyses have been made on the results of the teaching experiments. Moreover, this research attempts to measure the students’ critical thinking though illustrated composition so as to further verify the feasibility of such a teaching method in English teaching.This research involves a three-month teaching experiment with its 101 subjects chosen from a middle school in Zhangzhou City. The research data are collected through the CCTST questionnaire(California Critical Thinking Skills Test), reading comprehension tests and illustrated composition. The results of analyses indicate that critical reading strategies teaching promotes the development of students’ critical thinking skills, and strengthens their reading comprehension. In addition, the method of measuring students’ critical thinking by illustrated composition is also proved effective and feasible.This research confirms that the critical reading teaching can help students develop critical thinking skills and enhance their reading comprehension. The author believes that the English teachers can be inspired both in the theory and practice, to establish the teaching concept based on the new curriculum criteria with more attention on developing the students’ critical thinking.