Application Of Critical Reading Strategies In Teaching Of English Reading In Secondary Vocational School

The outline of the National medium and long-term educational reform and development program(2010-2020)states that “advocating heuristic,inquiry,discussion and interactive teaching to help students learn how to study.” The basic requirements of the English syllabus for secondary vocational schools are: guessing the meaning of the words according to the context and word formation;making simple inference and judgement according to the information of the article;understanding the textual structure of the articles and the author's intentions,views and attitudes.It is clear that students' deep thinking and rational use of some critical reading strategies are reflected in the requirements of syllabus.However,the real teaching situation of secondary vocational school is that teachers dominate the whole class,students just listening and there is no or little interaction between teachers and students.Therefore the reading ability of the students is low and they lack interest in learning English.Of course,this doesn't mean that they are incapable of reading,but that they rarely use some critical reading strategies for deep reading consciously.According to Crawley and Mountain(1995),there are three types of reading,they are literal reading,interpretive reading and critical reading.Critical reading refers to the highest-level understanding of the text which includes analyzing,evaluating and so on.With the rapid development of knowledge economy,people need to have a higher level of cognitive ability to analyze and judge from a large amount of information.Critical reading is an important way to cultivate this cognitive ability.Therefore,this study attempts to use some critical reading strategies in English reading class to improve the reading ability and scores of the students and the current situation of English reading class in secondary vocational school.This study used teaching experiment,taking constructivism theory,schema theory and critical discourse analysis theory as theoretical basis.The subjects were selected from two parallel Grade Three Classes of one of secondary vocational schools of Xinzhou in Shanxi province.The teaching experiment lasted for a whole semester from the early November to the late December in 2018.This study attempts to apply such critical reading strategies as prediction,analysis,inference,evaluation and summary in English reading class in experimental class.It tries to answer two questions: 1.Can students' reading scores be improved by using critical reading strategies in secondary vocational school? 2.Can students' awareness of using critical reading strategies be improved by conducting critical reading classes in secondary vocational school?The research instruments used in this study are test,questionnaire and interview.The result of experiment shows that critical reading strategies are helpful to students to answer reading comprehension questions and the students' reading scores in EC is significantly higher than that of in CC.Under the guidance of the teacher,the students' awareness of using critical reading strategies has been strengthened too.The result of this study shows that it is very necessary to cultivate students' use of critical reading strategies in English teaching in secondary vocational school.It not only intensifies the students' awareness of using critical reading strategies,but also improves the students' critical thinking ability,so their reading scores have been improved too.