An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Critical Reading On Non-English Majors' Critical Thinking Skills

In recent years,improving students' critical thinking has become one of the most important goals of education in school,especially in universities.In English teaching research,there are growing studies focusing on critical thinking.Most of them,however,tend to put forward the teaching plan and strategies;few scholars carry out further study and discussion on the specific course of cultivating critical thinking.Employing qualitative and quantitative methods,this thesis proceeds from non-English majors' critical thinking skills,trying to verify whether critical reading course has a positive influence on students' critical thinking.The specific forms of quantitative study are questionnaires and tests,which are designed to measure the critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills of 60 non-English majors from Dalian University of Technology.The students are respectively from an oral English class and a critical reading class.The questionnaire and reading tests are designed to find out the non-English majors' status of critical thinking ability and their weakness in different dimensions.Meanwhile,the students taking the critical reading course are trained to be a critical thinker for the whole semester.A comparative analysis is conducted on the performances of these two classes at the end of the semester.Besides,the data of qualitative study is collected by classroom observation and teaching feedback,which explores the influence of critical reading course on critical thinking and the effective way to cultivate critical thinking.Based on data analysis and further discussion,this thesis comes to the following conclusions: firstly,there's really “the absence of critical thinking” among non-English majors,whose critical thinking skills manifest as weak trend;Secondly,critical reading course can really improve the students' critical thinking skills,especially analysis skill.Thirdly,to strengthen the influence of critical reading on students' critical thinking skills,both teachers and students should emphasize on “discourse analysis,culture or background introduction,reader-response criticism” while teaching,thereby forming a all-around teaching-learning process of exploring independently before class,participating actively during class and developing reflectively after class.Fourthly,although critical reading has a positive influence on students' critical thinking skills,the influence is not very comprehensive.Therefore,to cultivate critical thinking talents,schools need not only to optimize the teaching model of critical reading course,but also to provide other courses to instill the basic knowledge of critical thinking in a long term to improve students' critical thinking skills comprehensively.