An Experimental Study Of Critical Reading Strategies Training In Junior School Students' English Reading

As a high-level reading mode,critical reading requires readers to dig out the hidden meanings and intention of the writer of the text on the basis of fully understanding the literal meanings of it.In recent years,critical reading has drawn more and more attention in language teaching abroad,and some theoretical researches have been conducted on it at home.Yet there is little study of how to cultivate junior school students' critical reading abilities.This thesis attempts to construct a set of strategies of critical reading for junior middle school students based on theories of Critical Discourse Analysis and Constructivist Learning,and then to make an experimental study of the effect of it on students' critical reading abilities.The research questions are as follows:(1)Can critical reading strategies training promote junior school students' critical reading abilities?(2)Can critical reading strategies training promote junior school students' using of critical reading strategies?The subjects of this research are two second-year junior classes in a junior middle school in Guangzhou City.The control class is taught by traditional reading method,the experiment class is trained to adopt the critical reading strategies in reading.After 10 weeks' experiment,various kinds of data are collected,counted and analyzed by software SPSS17.0.Through discussion the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The critical reading strategies contribute to promoting the students' critical reading abilities effectively.But students' analytical ability has not promoted as prominently as their deductive and evaluative abilities.(2)The training helps to enhance the students' using of critical reading strategies.But different strategies have shown different degrees of improvement.Strategies like predicting,lexical guessing and inference are used most frequently.Different Strategies have produced different effects on students of different reading levels.The advanced students prefer to apply inference and evaluating.The moderate level students are more likely to use predicting and lexical guessing,while the low level students show their preference in using previewing and predicting.In sum,the strategy training for critical reading has positive effects on junior middle school students' critical reading.This study provides a theoretical and practical reference for the teaching of English critical reading in junior middle school.However,due to the limitation of experimental time and sample size,the study has some limitations.