An Empirical Study On Applying Critical Reading Instruction In Senior High English Reading

With the development of the information era,people need to discriminate a lot of information and knowledge in a critical way.Besides,New Curriculum Standards(NCS)2013 explicitly stated that English teaching should “especially pay attention to improve students' ability of thinking and expressing in English,to cultivate their critical thinking ability.” Therefore,in accordance with the requirement of the era development and NCS,it's vital to cultivate and develop students' critical thinking ability.Critical reading plays a vital role in cultivating the students' critical thinking.However,In the present case,teachers focus on words,sentence patterns and grammatical structures in reading class and ignore the cultivation of the students' critical thinking ability.Students lack the ability to read critically with analysis,judgment,inference,and evaluation in the reading process.Therefore,Critical Reading Instruction should be focused on to cultivate students' critical thinking ability.The research aims to improve the students' reading proficiency and critical thinking by conducting Critical Reading Instruction.The study is based on the constructivist learning theory and critical discourse analysis theory.Some relative theories are stated such as critical thinking and critical reading.The writer explores Critical Reading Instruction by combining some relative theories with the teaching practice.The writer put forward three problems in the study:(1)What is the overall situation of senior high students' critical reading?(2)Are there any differences in critical thinking before and after the application of Critical Reading Instruction?(3)Is there any improvement in senior high students' English reading proficiency after the application of Critical Reading Instruction? Moreover,the writer designs some activities: autonomous thinking activity,group discussion activity,critical reading questions.In the teaching procedures of criticalreading,the writer applies the designed teaching activities penetrated in the pre-reading,while-reading,post-reading,which aims to make the students master the critical reading skills and learn to distinguish between facts and opinions,recognize the author's tone and purpose,make inference and draw conclusion.The research is conducted in two parallel classes.Critical Reading Instruction is conducted in EC while the original teaching is carried out in CC.Instruments applied in the whole experiment are reading comprehension test papers,Critical Thinking Questionnaire and the software SPSS 22.0.Questionnaire,combined with interview,is adopted to understand the overall situation of senior high students' critical reading and the differences in critical thinking before and after the application of Critical Reading Instruction.Tests are adopted to check whether Critical Reading Instruction can improve students' reading proficiency and critical thinking skills after applying it.According to the data statistics and analysis of questionnaires,combined with the results of interviews,the students between EC and CC have little understanding of critical thinking before the experiment while the students in EC have remarkable improvement in critical thinking after using Critical Reading Instruction.In addition,their critical attitudes have changed a lot.In accordance with the data statistics and analysis of tests,the students' scores of the post-test in EC are evidently higher than those of the students in CC after the experiment.It is fully stated that the participants in EC are able to use critical reading skills to improve their reading achievements while faced with the problems in the reading tests.After a semester's experiment,the author draws a conclusion that Critical Reading Instruction can not only improve students' reading proficiency but also cultivate the students' critical thinking skills.EC = Experimental Class CC = Control Class...