An Experimental Study On Developing Critical Thinking In English Reading Teaching For Senior High School Students

This study is based on the theory of critical thinking, studying the examples and the effects of critical thinking training in high school English reading teaching through teaching experiments. The purpose of this study:Carrying on critical reading in high school English reading teaching, training students’ critical thinking, and testing whether it is conducive to the development of the students’critical thinking.During the ten years of English teaching, the author has found that we face some serious problems in English reading teaching. The teachers and students focus too much attention on grammar, just understanding the surface content of reading text and ignoring the deep meaning of the text. The teachers control the classroom activities and the students have few chances to question or criticize what they have read. This negative impact on English teaching has become increasingly prominent. How to develop students’ critical thinking in senior high school teaching has become an important issue that we should pay great attention to.We teachers should not just focus on literal information and language points of the texts, but more importantly, we must develop students’critical thinking, such as questioning, predicting, reasoning, induction and evaluating, etc. And we should guide students to learn to think independently, study independently and explore creatively so that they will be able to not only appreciate the beauty of language but also get an in-depth comprehension of the text structure, background and the intentions of authors.In this paper, Senior One students from Fuzhou Yan An Middle School were tested. Based on the overall investigation and analysis of the present situation of critical thinking, I made a questionnaire survey at the beginning of the semester in the two classes I teach, one is experiment group and the other is controlled group. Then I conducted a year’s experiment teaching:I applied the cultivation of critical thinking in the English reading teaching in the experiment group, while I practiced a traditional teaching method in the English reading teaching in the controlled group. Finally I conducted pre-and post-questionnaire surveys and made further analyses and comparisons. The conclusion of the paper shows:After one academic year of experiment, the experimental group was significantly better than the control group in the degree of development of critical thinking. Critical thinking training in English reading teaching in senior high school can help students grasp the profound meaning of the text, effectively improve their critical thinking, it also has important practical significance...