An Empirical Study On DRTA Instruction In English Critical Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading ability is an important part of English comprehensive ability.How to help high school students improve their reading ability has become an important topic in the current English teaching research."The English Curriculum for Senior Middle School"(Education Ministry,2011)clearly pointed out that in English teaching,teachers should focus on cultivating students' ability of obtaining information from text,guessing words meaning from sentence structure and context,predicting the development of the plot,inferring based on clues and understanding the main idea of article and the authors' writing intention.In short,that means improving students' comprehensive English ability through cultivating students' critical reading ability.But the English reading teaching nowadays ignores critical reading ability.Critical reading strategies are used in the DRTA instruction compared with the traditional reading teaching method.Teachers inspire students to think and construct their own language structure based on existing schema in the process of guiding students to read,predict and prove.Finally,students' critical reading ability will be improved.Based on the above,the author chose two natural classes of grade two,50 students in each class,as the experimental subjects in Jiuquan No.1 Middle School.One class was the Experimental Class(EC)while the other was the Control Class(CC).Before the experiment,the author conducted reading comprehension and critical reading strategies pre-test in EC and CC.And then,the author used the DRTA instruction in EC,Axelord's six critical reading strategies including previewing,annotating,outlining,summarizing,taking inventory and analyzing and evaluating were brought into teaching process to cultivate students' critical reading ability,while the Grammar-Translation reading teaching method was used in CC.After the experiment,reading comprehension and critical reading strategies post-test were given to both classes.Finally,all of the test data were analyzed by SPSS.After data analysis,it can be found that the DRTA instruction can help students make a big progress both in critical reading achievement and critical reading strategies using in daily reading.Teachers should pay attention to apply the effective reading teaching method of to the reading teaching and transfer the teacher centered reading mode into a more effective one that teachersguide students to do more thinking activities while reading.By this way,it not only arouses students' interest in reading,but improve students' critical reading ability.What's more,enhance the students' awareness of using critical reading strategy in daily reading and improve students' critical thinking ability and innovation consciousness ultimately.Meanwhile,the research is limited by the experimental time,the sample size and the researcher's educational background and research experience.The research results need to be further studied and verified.