Correlation Between Senior One Students' Critical Thinking Disposition And English Reading Comprehension Performance

Critical thinking and English reading skills are two necessary skills for high school students.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)clearly states that cultivating and developing students' critical thinking in English subjects needs students to independently analyze and reason about the information in the article,to analyze and evaluate the viewpoints,attitudes,emotions and intentions contained in the text in a rational manner,to understand and appreciate foreign excellent culture critically.Therefore,in English reading,the process of students' analysis and comprehension is the process of students' thinking and speculation.Based on Facione's two-dimensional structure,this study combines the topic-setting features of English reading comprehension for college entrance examination,focusing on the correlation between the critical thinking disposition of senior one students and English reading comprehension.This study conducts a quantitative research method,taking 343 senior one students from a middle school in Nanchong as the research participants,and collecting data through questionnaires and tests.The collected data will be processed by SPSS 22.0 data analysis software to ensure the scientificity and objectivity of the results of this research.This study mainly uses the descriptive statistical analysis to learn the critical thinking disposition of senior one students;analyzes whether there is a difference in critical thinking disposition between male and female students by independent-sample T-test;explores the correlation between critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension performance and the relationship between the dimensions of critical thinking disposition and the various types of English reading comprehension through correlation analysis.The results of this research show that:(1)As a whole,senior one students have a tendency to think critically and are at an intermediate level.Specific to the dimensions of critical thinking,senior one students behave well in the three dimensions of inquisitiveness,analyticity and maturity,but perform weak in four dimensions of self-confidence,truth-seeking,open-mindedness and systematicity.(2)Male participants are significantly different from female participants on critical thinking disposition.Males have a better performance in four aspects,including analyticity,inquisitiveness and systematicity.Whereas females are stronger in the two dimensions of open-mindedness and maturity.(3)There is no statistically significant correlation between the critical thinking disposition of senior one students and their English reading comprehension ability.In the 7dimensions of critical thinking disposition,there is a certain correlation between analyticity,systematicity and theme topic questions.Finally,the author also puts forward some suggestions for future English reading teaching: teachers should strive to create an environment where students can think independently,find problems and solve problems by themselves.Teachers should also know the critical thinking levels of students with different gender,so that they can guide students to develop some thinking modes in the teaching of reading,includingobservation,comparison,analysis,inference,induction,construction,and evaluation.