A Study On The Environment For The Cultivation Of Postgraduates' Critical Literacy Under English Classroom Presentation Teaching Model

Classroom presentation,a kind of pedagogical task based on task-based language teaching theory,is one of the effective ways to improve students' English communicative skills.In recent years,classroom presentation is increasingly applied to college English class.The deficiency of critical thinking(literacy)refers to the phenomenon of lacking analyzing,synthesizing,assessing,reasoning and thinking in foreign language teaching and learning,which was put forward by Professor Huang Yuanshen 20 years ago.This phenomenon has gradually attracted researchers and scholars' attention in academic field.However,most of the researchers focused on English majors,and their researches were designed to improve their critical thinking or establish the theoretical model of critical thinking.The researches aiming at non-English major postgraduates and the environment for cultivating students' critical literacy are relatively rare.Therefore,based on the Four Resources Model,5P Model and the two key elements of critical literacy cultivation,this study focused on the application of English classroom presentation among law major postgraduates in the legal English class,and analyzed how the environment for cultivating the law major postgraduates' critical literacy was constructed with this teaching method.This research took one legal English class for postgraduates as the case,which was in one of the universities in Wuhan,Hubei province.With the questionnaire,interview and classroom observation,the researcher discussed the status quo of the English learning environment for cultivating critical literacy,and then researched the teaching method built on English classroom presentation with duration of 17 weeks,analyzing how the environment was established to cultivate the students' critical literacy,in expectation of enriching language teaching models for critical literacy cultivation and providing some effective ways and references for teachers to cultivate and develop college students' critical literacy.The findings of this research are summarized as follows: firstly,the status quo of the English learning environment for cultivating critical literacy among the students is not optimistic,and the students have poor awareness of critical literacy.90% students' previous English classes were teacher-centered,and they passively received what the teachers indoctrinated in class.The teachers paid more attention on English language teaching while ignoring students' logic and thinking development.60% students have done presentation before but spend little time learning English out of class.Secondly,the favorable circumstances for the cultivation of critical literacy in this research are summarized as “EIPER”,with each letter referring to one strategies: E-learning environment,inquiring into facts,presenting the given topic,exchanging information,and reflecting on the performance.Finally,according to the feedback from the open questionnaires and interviews,the researcher puts forward some suggestions for the environment for cultivating students' critical literacy.Hopefully,this research can provide a new angle of view and some references on the cultivation of critical literacy in English teaching.