A Study On Cultivating High School Students' Critical Thinking Through Cooperative Activities In English Classes

With the rapid development of the Internet era,critical thinking(CT)is beneficial for people to handle a tremendous amount of information.Similarly,in English learning,students need CT to promote the acquisition of knowledge and the formation of skills.However,the demand of cultivating CT in English leaning can not be met without certain classroom teaching methods.Cooperative activity,as one of the widely used teaching methods in English classroom,has been proved to be conducive for students' CT development.Based on relevant interaction theories,collaborative activities in English classroom include not only teacher-student interaction,but also student-student interaction is contained.Therefore,research questions of this paper include how students' CT is developed in the process of teacher-student interaction and student-student interaction through cooperation activities.And teachers' perceptions about designing cooperative activities to develop students' CT were investigated.In the process of teacher-student interaction,the teacher plays a guiding role,and particularly teacher's instructions and questions will lead students' thinking direction.In the process of interaction between students and students,verbal interaction among peers can also stimulate students' diverse thinking.Therefore,in order to learn about students' critical thinking,the author in this research mainly studied the teacher-student interaction through teachers' instructions and questions and student-student interaction through the language exchanges.Four teachers from a high School in Chengdu and four classes taught by the teachers were selected as the research subjects to adopt relevant data collection for three months.By analyzing the data of classroom observation,it was found that students' CT(remembering,understanding,applying,analyzing,evaluating,creating)can be more developed through the teacher's indirect instructions and referential questions in the while-cooperative activity and post-cooperative activity stages.Moreover,these critical thinking skills can also be developed in student-student interaction through six conversation tactics:(a)repetition;(b)comprehension;(c)confirmation;(d)clarification;(e)judgement;(f)construction.Finally,through interviews,the author learned about the four teachers' intentions and methods of designing cooperative activities to develop students' CT.It was found that the four teachers sometimes design cooperative activities to cultivate students' remembering,understanding,applying,analyzing,evaluating CT skills,and tend to choose themes that are close to students' lives.They usually first understand students' existing knowledge of related topics,and then set some higher-level cognitive problems which need cooperative work to solve.