Critical Reading Activities In Junior High School English Classes

Critical reading teaching is popular in Western education.In recent years,some scholars in China have realized the practical significance of critical reading ability.English Subject Key Competencies,which is illustrated in the latest English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School,stresses clearly that critical thinking is one of the key competencies which needs to be cultivated in students.Critical thinking and critical reading are very closely related.However,study on cultivation of English critical reading ability is still in a groping phase.This study aims to investigate the present situation of the design of critical reading activities in the current junior English textbooks and the teachers’ implementation of critical reading activities in junior high school reading classes.The research consists of two parts.Firstly,the author starts with a checking out and analysis of all the critical reading activities in three versions of textbooks used in Guangzhou,Shanghai and Beijing,using an analytic framework of critical reading activities developed on the basis of previous researchers.In the second part,the researcher carried out two questionnaire surveys among 76 junior English teachers in Guangzhou,aiming to investigate front-line teachers’ teaching behaviors and preferences in reading lessons and their perception and choices of critical reading activities.The following findings are obtained through the research.First,critical reading activities are observed in the current three versions of junior English textbooks.However,these activities focus mainly on training of some reading strategies such as vocabulary strategies,and strategies like previewing,predicting,annotating and analyzing.Activities related to other critical reading strategies such as evaluating,summarizing or questioning cannot be found.Second,the design of critical reading activities differs from one set of textbook to another.Among the three versions of textbooks in this study,the Shanghai version of textbook has the most critical reading activities while Beijing version has the fewest.Third,the junior English teachers have rather weak awareness of teaching critical reading strategies.The comparatively more frequently implemented critical reading strategies are vocabulary strategies,previewing,predicting and annotating.Other strategies like evaluating,summarizing,analyzing andquestioning strategies are less emphasized.Last,most teachers would set cultivating students’ critical reading activities as one of the teaching objectives in their reading lessons.However,some teachers don’t set improving students’ critical reading ability as one of the reading lessons’ objectives because they think the texts in textbooks are too simple to design any critical activities.Others do not do that just because they have not yet developed the awareness of doing so.What’s more,teachers do not have deep and correct understanding of critical reading activities in that they can hardly recognize critical reading activities in the current textbook in Guangzhou.Based on these findings,this study provides suggestions for junior English teachers as well as the textbook compilers.