Study On The Cultivation Of Students' Critical Thinking In Senior High School English Extensive Reading Teaching

The National English Curriculum(2017 Version)emphasizes that while developing students' language competence,their ability to analyze and solve problems and their critical and creative ability should also be cultivated.However,in China' s educational practice,most of the teachers still limit their responsibilities to developing students' basic language skills and indoctrination of language knowledge.The cultivation of students' critical thinking ability is somehow ignored.With the further development of education reform,more and more researches have been carried out to study the development of Critical Thinking in English reading teaching.But the experimental researches on cultivating students' critical thinking ability in English extensive reading teaching is still rare.Based on the Four Resources Model of Critical Literacy(Luke and Freebody,1999),this thesis tries to study the cultivation of students' critical thinking in senior high school English extensive reading teaching by adopting critical literacy.In this research,120 students from 2 parallel classes in Grade Two in XF Senior High School were selected as subjects.Among the two classes,Class 23(60 students)was randomly chosen as the experimental class randomly where critical literacy-oriented extensive reading teaching was carried out,while Class 24 was the controlled class where students read extensively in a traditional way.The duration of this experiment is four months.In order to measure the two variables(subjects' critical thinking ability and their comprehending achievement)before and after the experiment,three kinds of instruments are used in this thesis:Washington State University's Critical Thinking Rubric,two comprehending test papers and four interviews.After analyzing the relevant data and the interviews,the results show that:(1)The critical-oriented English extensive reading teaching can improve students' critical thinking ability.(2)It is efficient in improving the reading ability of students with different English proficiency.(3)It is helpful to develop students' reading ability in guessing,inferring and summarizing as well.Although the critical-oriented English extensive reading teaching has been proved to have positive effects,there still exists some limitations.Therefore,more experiments andlonger duration are supposed to make to enrich the critical literacy teaching theory so that more and more teachers and students will benefit from it.