Action Research Of Mingling Critical Thinking Teaching With English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Critical thinking, the basis of creative thinking, has been attached great importance to since it is an important component of "key competencies",which help boost the development and reform of technology and society. Senior high school students are at their special period of their psychological development process. Thus, lack of thinking education will lay great influence on their future life and study. Since language and thinking are closely connected, it is necessary and urgent to bring thinking education into language classes, especially reading classes.Based on the Constructive Learning theory, Social-culture Theory of Vytgosky and Theory of Cognitive Development, the author carried out an action plan in a four-star senior high school in southern Jiangsu province. The research aims to answer the following questions: what methods and strategies can be employed to mingle thinking education with reading teaching? Can we improve both students’ critical thinking competence by mingling critical thinking education with reading class? Does the teaching pattern help improving students’ English study? Is it beneficial to arousing students’ interest in learning English and improving students’ reading competence?During the six-month process of action plan, the researcher chose Advance with English as the main teaching material,on the basis of which,materials from various sources are also adopted as supplemental reading texts. The researcher try to cultivate students’ critical thinking dispositions by the following means: 1)digging the reading material from the perspective of critical thinking sub-skills; 2)creating tasks to motivate thinking; 3) designing inspirational questions to activate thinking; 4)constructing friendly class atmosphere to ensure thinking activities; 5)replacing exams with multidimensional evaluation. Through the analysis of statistics of survey, interview and pre- and post- tests,the researcher observed that mingling critical thinking teaching with English reading class does great help to stimulating learning interest and is beneficial to improving students’reading competence. What is more important is that this teaching experiment can help students develop good thinking habits and in return promote the language study.