An Experimental Study Of Critical Reading Teaching In Senior High School English Classrooms

Since 1970 s, western countries have realized the importance of critical reading. However, in China, we began to pay our attention to critical reading only in the last decade. Critical reading is a high-level reading activity, requiring readers to separate facts from opinions, to get the author's real purpose and to explore the hidden meaning behind the words by advanced thinking activities, such as predicting, analyzing, and evaluating. Thus, critical reading teaching can be regarded as an important way to cultivate students' critical thinking ability which also contains similar thinking activities. We all know that the rapid development of our society calls for more elites with critical and creative thinking ability. Besides, our New English Curriculum Standard also points out that students' critical thinking ability should be developed urgently. And it is students themselves that need the critical ability most. Thus, it is necessary to cultivate students' critical ability in English classrooms.Now the studies of critical reading home and aboard are colorful. However, the empirical researches on it in our China are far from enough, and most of them tend to discuss the influence of critical reading on reading proficiency and writing ability, only very limited researches talk about its influence on critical thinking with accurate data. I hope this thesis can make some progress on it.Based on the previous studies and directed by the Constructivism Learning Theory and the Critical Discourse Analysis Theory, an experimental study lasting for three months is carried out with references to other researchers' critical reading models. This thesis aims to solve three problems:(1) Whether critical reading teaching can help students to get higher English grades?(2) To what extent critical reading teaching can improve students' critical thinking ability?(3) What are the students' attitudes towards critical reading teaching? The subjects are two classes in Grade One in Laoling Number One Middle School. One is the experimental class in which the critical reading teaching is adopted; the other is the controlled class in which the traditional teaching method is conducted. There are pre-tests and post-tests to measure whether their grades, critical thinking ability have any changes; besides, questionnaires are designed to test students' attitude towards this teaching experiment. The result shows that the above three aspects all present positive changes through analyzing the collected data.Therefore, the application of critical reading teaching in senior high school English classrooms has great significance. It is not only an important way to cultivate students' critical thinking ability, but also a powerful weapon to activate students' learning enthusiasm. It not only benefits students' present study, but also provides a good foundation for student's life-long study.