The Effect Of Critical Reading Model On Reading Comprehension Ability Of Senior High School Students

The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017 Version)(Education Ministry,2018)pinpoints that the cultivation of students' linguistic skills includes extracting key information and opinions,predicting content based on the title,understanding speaker's intentions according to tone and intonation,and reading critically.However,in current teaching practice,the absence of ability for deep-level reading has become the main barrier of developing students' English reading comprehension ability.Critical reading is an active reading promoting the development of critical thinking in which readers,on the basis of cognition and understanding,analyze,question,identify,infer,summarize and evaluate the writer and content,and excavate the implicit meaning of texts to achieve the deep-level understanding of the text.Thus,critical reading strategy includes previewing,questioning,annotating,inferring,summarizing,analyzing and evaluating.Within the framework of schema theory and constructivism learning theory,a critical reading model is designed to explore the following three research questions:Firstly,is there any statistically significant relationship between critical reading model and students'critical reading strategy use?If "yes",what effect does critical reading model have on students at different proficiency levels?Secondly,is there any statistically significant relationship between critical reading model and students' reading comprehension ability?If"yes",which aspects does it mainly manifest in?what effect does critical reading model have on students at different proficiency levels?Thirdly,how can critical reading model be effectively applied to senior English reading teaching?The experiment lasts for two months(from September to November 2017)in X middle school in Jiangsu Province.The participants involved in this experiment are altogether 98 students in Senior One.Critical reading model is adopted in experimental class while the traditional teaching methods are applied for control class.Questionnaires,reading comprehension tests and SPSS 18.0 are employed to compare the students' frequency of critical reading strategy use and reading comprehension ability throughout the experiment.Findings show that(1)critical reading model is more effective in increasing students'frequency of critical reading strategy use,especially on strategies of "previewing", "inferring","analyzing" and "evaluating".Besides,the improvement of elementary and intermediate students is significant;(2)critical reading model is more conducive to improve the reading comprehension ability of students,especially on students' analyzing,judging and summarizing ability.And the improvement of students at elementary and intermediate level is more obvious than students at advanced level;(3)on the basis of the case analysis and summary of classroom observation,the critical reading model mainly consists of six steps "deciding reading objectives-making predictions or setting questions-verifying and judging-analyzing and questioning text-evaluating text/writer's opinion-criticizing and reflecting".The experiment verifies the feasibility and necessity of integrating critical reading model into senior English reading teaching,and provides certain references for English teaching in high school.Teachers should put emphasis on students' training of critical reading strategy,the selection of the genre of reading passage and the design of classroom activities.