Improving Students’ Critical Thinking In English Reading Classroom: An Empirical Study

Critical thinking, a new way of teaching method, plays a really important role in cultivating students’ creative spirit and innovational competence that is generally accepted by western educational circles. The High School English Curriculum Requirements require the cultivation of students’ innovational competence and critical thinking competence. However, most students lack of a good command of written and spoken English.This study starts with the requirements of quality education; trying to cultivate students’ critical thinking in English reading teaching in senior high schools. This research took a senior high school in Sichuan Province as an example, and it aimed at finding out the relationship between critical thinking cultivation in reading and student’s deductive, analytic competence in the basis of Schema Theory and Critical Thinking Theory. Recording the students’ performance in class and adjusting teaching ways according to practices are to conduct teaching plan to cultivate students’ critical thinking competence.Through setting a series questions, discussing at the classroom and studying together, the writer can according to present situation of students’ critical thinking skills to design the teaching process and train students’ ability in critical thinking.The research is conducted to check whether or not critical thinking training can cultivate students’ critical thinking competence and critical thinking training can improve students’ reading grades or what are requirements for a teacher of the day.The present study reported in this paper lasted for nearly three months. The instruments used in the paper were interviews, classroom observations, teaching journals and comprehensive reading tests.Through a present situation investigation and a teaching experiment, the writer found that teachers paid more attention on the application of grammar and words when teaching reading in this school and students’ ability of reporting their own thoughts is weak. There is no questions of teachers or passages’ statements. The experiment indicated that the critical thinking reading class can be practiced by the students and also modeled by their teachers.The results show that according to students’ performance in class and feedback of the research, we can get the conclusion that conducting critical thinking training in reading can improve students’ critical thinking competence.Based on the present study, it is suggested that in the combination of cooperation discussion, asking questions and challenging themselves to express different ideals, the factor of learner emotion could be focused in the basis of respecting students’ subjective status in learning so that teachers can cultivate skills and attitude of critical thinking.