An Investigation Into Cultivating Students' Thinking Quality In Senior High School English Reading Classes

Cultivating thinking is important for language learning and the long-term development of students.But thinking teaching is not attached enough importance to.Some teachers don't create sufficient contexts and often neglect the meaning of the certain discourses.Consequently,they often fail to implement the cultivation of thinking in their teaching practice.In addition,in the last decades,the English course has not paid enough attention to the cultivation of students' thinking ability.So there is an urgent need for quality-oriented language teaching to inspire a new atmosphere in English teaching.The thesis focuses on looking into the teachers' attitudes towards cultivating thinking quality in their reading classes and the present situation of the cultivation and the influencing factors.A total of 132 senior high school teachers are chosen as the research subjects.They come to attend continuing professional development(CPD)training organized by Hebei Normal University.The data are collected from two instruments:(1)questionnaires about the attitude,teachers' practice of cultivating thinking quality in reading classes.(2)interviews about the influencing factors of the situation and the obstacles teachers meet in their practice.The data are analyzed using SPSS 13.0 for Windows after all the questionnaires are collected.Then the interviews are recorded,and the results are also analyzed.The major findings of the study are as follows: 1)The majority of the teachers attach great importance to thinking quality and demonstrate positive attitudes,which they think is important for students' long-term development.2)The positive attitudes account for the current situation where teachers are passionate to cultivate thinking quality.Most of the teachers are making efforts to improve thinking quality although they still have a long way to go to put it into real practice.3)Some of the teachers have difficulties and obstacles in cultivation of thinking for four factors: the influence of previous knowledge-based language teaching methods and the pressure of academic tests;students' unbalanced development of thinking quality and learning competence;teachers' lack of relevant knowledge of thinking;unequal opportunities of teachers' training and hysteresis assessment on thinking quality.According to the results of the investigation,the majority of the teachers surveyed hold the positive attitude towards cultivating thinking quality and the situation of their teaching practice is relatively satisfying.Especially,they have made some progress in cultivating students' thinking in English reading.There are four factors influencing the cultivation of thinking quality,and they have to make efforts to overcome them.The main factors are worth studying in real process of reading teaching.Although there are some limitations of the investigation,teachers and students can still benefit a lot from the research.And more studies to verify the results of the research are welcomed.