A Correlational Study Of Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Ability And Their English Reading Proficiency

Critical thinking ability is a research hotpot in many fields,and attention of English education field to critical thinking ability at home began from Absence of Critical Thinking written by Huang Yuanshen.Thus,a large number of educators and researchers draw attention to this aspect.Making a general survey of studies on critical thinking ability in the field of domestic foreign language education in recent years,there are some research perspectives,such as designing assessment tools of critical thinking ability that are suitable for Chinese students and exploring approaches to cultivate students' critical thinking ability.As a result,it is necessary to make research on critical thinking ability.The present study aims to discuss effect of senior students' critical thinking ability(including critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills)on their English reading proficiency.Specifically speaking,it firstly investigates the general characteristics of senior high school students' critical thinking ability,then explores the correlation between senior high school students' critical thinking ability and their English reading proficiency,finally discovers some key factors which affect critical thinking ability cultivation in English reading teaching.The current thesis selects 46 senior high school students from one high school of Wu'an,in Hebei province.Firstly,it respectively utilizes Chinese Version of California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CCTDI-CV)and California Critical Thinking Skills Test(CCTST)which was compiled by Luo Qingxu to test students' critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills.Then,the author has interviews with five chosen senior students for the purpose of knowing whether there exist some key factors which affect critical thinking ability cultivation in English reading teaching.Finally,the research sends out a matriculation English reading test to test senior students' English reading proficiency.The study utilizes questionnaires,the interview and English test to collect related data,and analyzes them in quantitative and qualitative ways.At the same time,the study adopts SPSS 22.0 and Microsoft(Excel)to collect and analyze these collected data.The study made the research from three aspects based on Facione' theory about critical thinking ability and researches abroad and at home.After data collection and analysis,there are major findings as follows:1.For critical thinking disposition,students have moderate even low critical thinking disposition,based on that students have low or moderate scores of critical thinking disposition,which are lower than 280 points.For subscales of critical thinking disposition,students obtain different scores of subscales,and their scores are generally lower than 40 except scores of open mindedness.For critical thinking skills,students almost have low or moderate scores of critical thinking skills,thus their critical thinking skills perform moderately even weakly,because no students' scores are higher than 28.2.In regard to the correlations between senior students' critical thinking disposition and their English reading proficiency as well as critical thinking skills and their English reading proficiency,senior students' scores of critical thinking disposition and skills have positive and strong correlation with their English reading total scores,which means senior students' critical thinking ability have effect on their English reading proficiency.In other words,the higher senior students' critical thinking abilities are,the higher the senior students' English reading proficiency will be.3.On the basis of these results of interviews between the author and students,the research discovers some key factors which affect students' critical thinking ability cultivation in English reading teaching,namely backward teaching idea,unequal teacher-student relationship and deep-rooted exam-oriented education.Based on collected data,the author comprehensively and systematically analyzes senior high school students' critical thinking ability and their English reading proficiency.It will also shed some light on the later researches.