A Study Of Effectiveness Of English Writing Teaching From The Perspective Of Critical Thinking In Senior High Schools

Teachers in many senior schools still pay much attention to explain the sentences,structure,grammar and writing models.And they often stress the imitation of the writing models.Thus,students' thinking ability is developed slowly.It is not beneficial to cultivate students' thinking through traditional English writing teaching.The National English Curriculum Standards for Chinese Senior Schools(2016)demonstrate that English teaching of senior high school should focus on the students' critical thinking skills and abilities of analyzing and solving problems.Cultivating students' thinking character and developing their abilities of independent thinking are essential in English writing teaching in senior high schools.The effectiveness of teaching refers to positive predicting effects during the teaching process.As for the research on the senior high English writing teaching from the perspective of critical thinking in this paper,the effectiveness is defined as the effective improvement of students' writing proficiency,including the degree of clarity,relevance,logic and profundity.This paper,referring to author's experience and knowledge of English teaching,is aimed at checking the effectiveness of the senior high school English teaching from the perspective of critical thinking,and the effectiveness could be discussed from these following two research questions:(1)Is the English writing teaching from the perspective of critical thinking effective to cultivate senior high school students' writing proficiency?(2)What degrees could the effectiveness of English writing be improved from the perspective of critical thinking(clarity,relevance,logic and profundity)?The participants are from two classes at No.2 Middle School in Neijiang where I conduct the internship work.What makes the paper innovative is that the author uses empirical study as the research method.Thus the problems presented in the writings can be solved,such as lack of clarity,relevance,logic and profundity.In that case,students' writing proficiency could be improved.Participants are divided into the experimental group and the controlled group randomly.The instructional experiment lasts for seven weeks.Critical thinking skills are highlighted in the experimental group while the writing model,explanation on grammar and vocabulary are stressed in the controlled class.Before the experiment,teachers in the school used to give the writing models to the students and illustrate the vocabularies,sentences and grammar in writing classes.Students did not have systematic training of English writing.English writing teaching is conducted from the perspective of critical thinking in experimental class and traditional writing teaching method is used in the controlled class.The purpose of the pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire of the students in the experimental class is to check whether their critical thinking awareness reflected in English writing is changed after the experiment.In this paper,the writing proficiency scale is the English writing scoring criteria for College Entrance Examination and the evaluation model of four degrees of writing proficiency scale is adopted from Yu Jiying which pays much attention to critical thinking skills in the English writing proficiency evaluation,which is used by the Yang Lijuan.An interview with the participants in the experimental class is conducted to investigate the problems,progress and suggestions for the experiment.The data are collected from the questionnaires,the writing pre-test and post-test,which are statistically processed and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.The author concludes that the findings indicate that students' writing proficiency in the experimental class gets improved.Logic increases mostly and clarity increases a lot.The reasons of the effectiveness of clarity and logic could be summarized as follows: Such activities as brainstorming,prediction,fragmental writing and debates are of great benefit to improve students' critical thinking skills and awareness in the experimental class;It also results from the enlightenments of writing materials.Relevance is not promoted apparently,which lies in inadequate feedbacks,students' familiarity in writing topics of pre-test and post-test.The reason why profundity is improved least apparently may be that the restriction of the writing topics in the senior high schools,limited time of students' writing training and lack of bravery to express in groups owing to the poor oral English.So as to solve the ineffectiveness of relevance and profundity,at the end of this paper the author puts forward some proposals in the hope of giving some advice to the later and further researches:1.Teachers should assign some critical writing tasks and encourage students to make use of the after-class time to conduct the English critical writing training.2 Teachers should utilize the writing materials to deepen students' profundity of cognitive thinking.3.Proper organization is essential in meaningful class activities.For instance,teachers keep the student-centered and teacher-assisted relationship and improve their own critical thinking and awareness.Timely feedbacks are necessary.