An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Post-reading Writing Activities Guided By The Output-driven Hypothesis On The Critical Thinking Skills Of High School Students

Cultivating students' critical thinking ability is the demand of contemporary education,and English teaching is of no exception.Critical thinking ability is classified as a higher level thinking activity.In order to make students own it,it is more important to learn how to use it in addition to conceptual explanation.The teaching activities which can continuously activate the students' thinking state are conducive to the cultivation of their critical thinking ability.In this study,the design of post-reading writing activities in high school English reading teaching is taken as a method to cultivate students' critical thinking skills.Although reading and writing are two opposite language skills,reading has positive transfer to writing.Full internalization of reading helps to express accurately in writing.In order to enable the output with input,the inner link between the two should be used.Teachers should guide students to consciously apply the language knowledge,article structure,emotion and thinking they have obtained in the reading to writing.This study is based on the Output-Driven Hypothesis.Post-reading writing activities are designed under the guidance of Output-Driven Hypothesis.Through the reading-writing integration,students' critical thinking skills are trained and cultivated.Teaching reading class adopts the process of "motivating-enabling-writing-assessing".Writing is driving and goal,while reading is enabling and cushion.The purpose of this study is to answer the following questions:1.Under the guidance of Output-Driven Hypothesis,can the post-reading writing activities contribute to the improvement of students' English writing ability?2.Under the guidance of Output-Driven Hypothesis,can the post-reading writing activities contribute to the improvement of students' critical thinking skills?3.Under the guidance of Output-Driven Hypothesis,can the post-reading writing activities contribute to the improvement of students' awareness of using writing strategies?This study selected two parallel classes in the second year of high school in Linfen as the research subjects.In experimental class,the teaching activity was designed according to the Output-Driven Hypothesis in the teaching process of "motivating-enabling-writing-assessing".The control class used the traditional reading teaching method,and the order was "reading followed by writing".The writing test,the California Critical Thinking Skill Test and writing critical thinking strategies questionnaire were the research instruments,by which the students in the experimental class and the control class were measured before and after the experiment.The results were collected and processed by,statistical software,SPSS.Major findings of this experiment are as follows: 1)It is proved that Output-Driven Hypothesis teaching can promote writing ability better than traditional teaching.2)Post-reading writing activities guided by the Output-Driven Hypothesis are helpful for developing students' critical thinking skills.As for five sub-skills(explanation,interpretation,inference,evaluation and analysis),except for explanation,others are significantly improved comparing with that in control class.3)Teaching experiment guided be Output-Driven Hypothesis helps improve the awareness of using writing critical thinking strategies.The cultivation of language ability is closely related to the development of critical thinking ability.As for senior high school English teaching,besides the basic language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,the cultivation and training of critical thinking skills should be paid attention to.