The Influence Of English Critical Reading On Senior High School Students' Reading Abilities

Considered as an important teaching model,the teaching and learning of critical reading has received widespread attention in the field of education.An increasing number of educators and researchers at home and abroad have realized the necessity of combining critical thinking with specific disciplines in order to develop students in an all-round way.In English reading comprehension,students are often required to use critical reading skills,including challenging,evaluating,inferring,distinguishing and analyzing.However,so far empirical researches on the teaching and learning of English critical reading are still very lacking.Based on the related theories of critical reading,the constructivism learning theory and the schema theory,the current research was intended to explore the influence of English critical reading on senior high school students' English reading abilities.Three research questions were concerned,including the influence on students' reading comprehension test results,satisfaction degree and English learning initiative.The research was conducted on some fresh students from senior high school in Fuzhou.At the beginning of the new term,an English reading comprehension test was administered to the participants and the scores were recorded with the accuracy of four different types of examination questions calculated.The test results revealed that the reading comprehension abilities of the two groups are nearly at the same level.Later,the teaching and learning of critical reading was performed in the experimental group where the students were encouraged to read English texts by analyzing,inferring,evaluating,challenging,judging etc.On the contrary,the students of the control group were required to pay more attention to grammar and vocabulary.At the end of the term,both the experimental group and the control group were organized to take another English comprehension test.The test results showed that there was a significant difference between the reading abilities of the two groups.The experirment indicated that the teaching and learning of critical reading can create a positive influence on high school students'reading comprehension abilities.However,the positive influence of critical reading on students' reading comprehension abilities was limited by their vocabulary.The accuracy distribution of the four types of examination questions showed that there were distinguished differences between the two groups in reasoning questions and guessing questions.On the other hand,the satisfactory degree and the learning initiative of the experimental group were higher than the control group.