An Action Research On Critical Thinking Guided Questioning In English Classroom In Junior High School

Critical thinking cultivation is one of the basic goals of education,which aims at improving students' creative spirits and satisfying the requirements of students' development.The significance of cultivating critical thinking ability was also emphasized both in The National English Curriculum Standards for Ordinary Senior High School and English Subject Key Competencies.Nowadays,more English teachers in junior high schools would like to cultivate students' critical thinking ability in designated reading or writing classes.Questioning,which takes a large proportion in class,is always ignored to be used to cultivate students' critical thinking ability.Therefore this thesis tries to explore the impacts of critical thinking guided questioning on students' critical thinking ability in English classroom in junior high school.Based on the analysis of the previous studies,this study mainly focuses on the two research questions: 1.What strategies and skills are adopted in the process of critical thinking guided questioning? 2.What critical thinking skills are improved by critical thinking guided questioning? The researcher selected 45 students from Class23,Grade 9 as the research subjects and conducted a three-month action research in a middle school in Shenyang,aiming at exploring the impacts of classroom questioning on students' critical thinking ability.The research instruments used in this study includes classroom observation,questionnaires,interviews,the teacher's reflective journals and tests.At last,all of thedata were collected and analyzed by the software SPSS 20.0.According to the research results,the researcher draws the following conclusions.1.Higher-level questions have a greater impact on critical thinking ability.2.Ways of questions,types of questions and feedback forms all have impacts on cultivating students' critical thinking ability.3.Critical thinking guided questioning is propitious to students' abilities of analyzing,evaluating and inferring.Meanwhile,some corresponding suggestions are provided for future research according to those results above.These suggestions are as follows: 1.to enlarge experimental samples;2.to make a more specific research on the most appropriate proportion of different types of questions;3.to investigate whether questions posed by students have positive impacts on critical thinking ability.