An Empirical Study On Cultivating College Learners' Critical Reading Strategies In The English Instruction

Critical thinking has been listed as one principal aim of higher education in many countries. The general goal of American higher education, for instance, is to give priority to developing students' critical thinking and equip them with the ability to analyze and address problems. But in China, our exam-oriented education and teacher-centered instruction system have led to students' mechanical memory with little focus on critical thinking. Learners tend to accept the existing conclusion and seldom challenge their teachers and textbooks. In the college English reading instruction, teachers often ask their students to obtain "correct" and standard results instead of varied answers. Such instruction seriously restricts the development of learners' personality and critical thinking.The current study attempts to cultivate college learners'critical reading awareness and improve their reading comprehension by training their critical reading strategies (CRS) in the English instruction. Here are the main research questions.(1) Is CRS training effective in improving learners'critical reading awareness?(2) Is CRS training effective in improving learners'English reading comprehension ability?(3) Is CRS training more effective in arousing students'interest in learning English compared with the traditional reading method?To address the questions above, the researcher adopts the quasi-experimental design. The subjects are 80 freshmen from two intact classes of Shanxi Normal University. Every intact classes consists of 40 students. The researcher randomly chooses one as the experimental class (EC) trained by the CRS and the other as the control class (CC) taught by the traditional method. During the process, the questionnaires are used to investigate the students'critical reading awareness, the pre-test and post-test to check their reading comprehension ability and the interview to verify which teaching method is more effective in arousing students'interests in learning English. The data coming from two questionnaires and two tests are analyzed to identify whether there exists any difference between the EC and the CC. Subjects'responses to questions from the interview are transcribed into the text and then analyzed to explore students'attitude towards the traditional method and the CRS training.The research arrives at such conclusions:the CRS training is effective in improving learners'critical reading awareness and reading comprehension ability. By interviewing students, it is also found that the CRS training is more recognized and popular than the traditional reading method as well as more effective in arousing students'interests in learning English. Therefore, the CRS training deserves to be popularized in the English Language Teaching (ELT) in China.