Cultivating Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Skills In English Reading Teaching:From The Perspective Of Deep Learning Theory

Critical thinking,as a necessary skill in the 21 st century,is the core thinking quality that determines talent competition and comprehensive national strength development in the new era.The National English Curriculum Standards(revised version in 2017)advocates the cultivation of students' thinking quality and proposes it as one of the four key competencies of English course.Therefore,as one of the important dimensions of thinking quality,critical thinking is getting more and more attention from English teachers.Reading lesson,as the main lesson type of English teaching,has become the “battle position” of cultivating students' critical thinking skills.Besides,in English reading teaching in senior high schools at home,the teaching of language knowledge is attached great importance while the training of students' thinking ability is neglected.Thus,students' reading learning is just a kind of surface learning.In such a situation,only by constructing an English reading teaching that enables students to learn deeply can significantly change this situation and improve teachers' teaching efficiency.In view of this,this study aims to construct an English reading teaching model based on deep learning theory and explore the reading activities to cultivate students' critical thinking skills.Students from two classes of Grade one in Panzhou No.2 High School were researched.This study attempts to answer the two questions:(1).What impact does English reading teaching based on deep learning theory have on students' critical thinking skills? To what extent?(2).What impact does English reading teaching based on deep learning theory have on students' reading level while cultivating their critical thinking skills? First,the author investigated the critical thinking skills and reading level of students before the teaching experiment through questionnaires and Reading Test(Pre-test).Then,one of the classes was randomly selected as the experimental class,and English reading teaching based on deep learning theory was implemented for nearly one semester.The other class was the control class,implemented teaching in accordance with the traditional reading teaching model.After the experiment,questionnaires,Reading Test(Post-test),and interviews were used to investigate students' critical thinking skills and reading level again.The data collected during the experiment was analyzed with SPSS 22.0.The findings are as follows: First,English reading teaching based on deep learning theory can effectively improve senior high school students' critical thinking skills,especially in the aspects of interpretation,analysis,evaluation and inference,and the improvement scores are all greater than 0.7.Comparatively speaking,the aspects of explanation and self-regulation are improved less,and the improvement score is greater than 0.5,but less than 0.7.Among them,evaluation is improved the most,and self-regulation is the least.Secondly,while cultivating students' critical thinking skills,English reading teaching based on deep learning theory can significantly improve students' reading level.Therefore,English reading teaching based on deep learning theory has an important impact on students' critical thinking ability and reading level.Finally,this study provides some suggestions for the cultivation of students' critical thinking skills in reading teaching.