English Reading Teaching And Cultivation Of Critical Thinking In Senior High School

Critical thinking is the premise of developing students’ creativity and innovational competence. It has always been one of the hottest issues in western countries since the middle of 20 th century. Reading is an important part in second language acquisition, and it’s also a conceptual work. It’s stated in English Curriculum Standards for Senior High school(2003) that critical reading can meet the need of curriculum and contribute to the cultivation of critical thinking.The paper recruited 72 students in senior 2 from a key school and 68 students from an ordinary school of Luoyang as test subjects. Qualitative researches were adopted to discover the overall situation of critical thinking disposition and the frequency of using reading strategies of two schools and the differences between key school and ordinary school. Based on classroom observation, the author demonstrated the current situation of English reading teaching. Through interviews with teachers and students, the author probed into the factors that cause the lack of critical thinking,and came up with the strategies for cultivating critical thinking on senior high school students in English reading teaching. The major findings are listed as follows:(1) Students of both schools demonstrated rather weak ability in critical thinking disposition, there is no significant difference between two schools as a whole.However, key school students showed significantly higher ability in the sub-scale of critical thinking confidence and Inquisition.(2) Students of both schools were more likely to employ traditional reading strategies and critical reading strategies such as predicting, skimming, scanning,however, they rarely applied strategies such as inference, analysis, evaluation,summary and so on. Students in key school used guessing the meaning of a new word in co-text and inferring the writer’s purpose more frequently than students in ordinary school.(3) Constraint of traditional culture, students’ anxiety in classroom,examination-oriented system and the lack of critical thinking in teachers should be responsible for the lack of critical thinking in students. Students’ critical thinking canbe cultivated by building a harmonious and democratic teacher-student relationship,leading students to think independently, developing students’ question awareness and leading students to inquire cooperatively and discuss democratically. Besides,teachers should cultivate students’ critical thinking consciously by combining critical reading skills such as inferring, distinguishing facts and opinions, recognizing the author’s tone and purpose, evaluating and so on into English reading teaching.