Influence Of The Four Resources Model-based College English Reading Teaching On Students' Critical Thinking Ability

Developing critical thinking ability is one of the basic goals of education,especially in higher education(Bailin & Siegel,2003;of Canada Government,2002),besides,it is the foundation and key to cultivate innovative talents.Since twentieth Century,the theory of critical thinking ability is abundant,and how to improve students' critical thinking ability is a hot issue of education reform.In foreign countries,there are a wealth of teaching mode,however,in our country,through the specific teaching methods to cultivate students' critical thinking ability is still a major problem to be solved.The current study aims to explor a new mode of teachers' classroom reading teaching to facilitate students' critical ability.The present study was developed on the basis of the four resources model(4RM).The four resource model-based reading teaching has become the basis for the curriculum reform of Australia to cultivate students' thinking ability,which also have been widely used in the junior and senior in some western countries such as New Zealand and the United States,especially in the areas of reading and writing teaching.but at home,the Four Resource Model is still at the exploratory stage,the literature on which is relatively scarce.Integrated the 4RM into College English reading teaching,this paper endeavour to answer the following questions: First,can the 4RM-based college English reading teaching improve students' critical thinking ability? Which dimension of critical thinking ability improve more? Second,can the 4RM-based college English reading teaching better improve EFL learners' reading achievement compared with the its traditional counterpart.Third,what is students' attitude towards 4RM-based college English reading teaching ? In order to highlight the questions,two classes with the same level were prepared,one is the control class,implementing the traditional reading teaching focuses on language skills,the other one is the experimental class,teaching College English reading based on four resources model.The results show that: Subsequent to the implementation of the four resource model the experimental class' s critical thinking ability and reading scores was significantly higher than that of the control class;and on the five dimensions of critical thinking,students' made biggest progress in analysis and inference ability,evaluation and deductive ability also improved,and induction ability changed little;most of the students hold a positive attitude towards College English four based on the four resources model of teaching,they convinced that the teaching model is conducive to the cultivation of the way they think,the thought of dealing with the problems on the daily life,a small part of the students have a neutral attitude,speculate that critical thinking questions took up a lot of time instead of learning of language knowledge,which is not conducive to pass CET-4 and CET-6.The study found that it is feasible and effective to apply the four resource model to college English reading teaching practice to improve students critical thinking ability.And therefore encourage more college English educators to improve the framework for implementation of the four resource model-based college English reading teaching for the purpose of improving the students' critical thinking ability to a larger extent.