An Empirical Research On The Application Of Critical Reading Teaching Mode To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The National English Curriculum Standard for Common Senior High School(2017)indicated that students should read a text critically.Teachers should help students acquire the skills of prediction,skimming,scanning and guessing.Critical reading is not the process of readers’ receiving the information passively,but the process of readers’ communicating with the author of text on the basis of cultivating the deep-meaning of text.Based on these,this paper attempts to apply teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior high school,so as to promote students’ English reading skills by developing their critical thinking.With literature analysis,questionnaire and experiment,the author has carried on an empirical research in Fuqing Yuanhong Middle School from September 2017 to July 2018.The empirical instruments include two questionnaires and test papers for reading.The subjects of the study were 98 students from two classes of Grade One.The author considers Class 2 as the experimental class,applying the teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching,while Class 1 is regarded as the control class,adopting the traditional teaching mode in English reading teaching.This study aims to verify the following two hypotheses:1.Applying teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior high school can improve the students’ English reading competence.2.Applying teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior high school can enhance students’ awareness of using reading strategies.Based on the analysis of the collected data,the conclusions can be drawn as follows:1.Applying teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior high school can improve the students’ English reading competence.There is no significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Classin English reading competence before the experiment,according to the results of pre-test(20.79>20.72)(p=0.0918> 0.05).After the experiment,the post-test score of the experimental class was higher than that of the control class(24.67>21.96)and there is significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Class(p=0.001< 0.05).In terms of specific question types,there are significant differences between the experimental class and the control class in the respects of "inference" and the "understanding the basic structure of the article",reflecting that the critical reading teaching mode has significantly improved the ability in these respects.On the contrary,there is no significant difference in the respects of "analysis" and the "understanding of the main idea of the article" between them.2.Applying teaching mode of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior high school can enhance students’ awareness of using reading strategies.In the experimental class,the post-test score of was higher than that of the pre-test(81.04 > 63.81)and there is a significant difference between pre-test and post-test(p=0.000 <0.05).The results show that students have a greater using awareness of prediction,generalization,analysis and inference while there is no significant difference in evaluation strategy,reflection strategy as well as self-adjustment strategy.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward some relevant suggestions of the selection of reading materials,the cultivation of students’ thinking and the cooperation of different subjects for teachers and students to attach greater importance to critical reading and its strategies.The author hopes to make some contributions to improving the reading ability of high school students through this experiment.