An Investigation Into Teacher Questioning In Senior High School English Reading Instruction From The Perspective Of Critical Thinking

China's high school English curriculum standards(2017 edition)clearly states that it's necessary to cultivate students' key competence in English.Critical thinking is one of the important competences of English education and one of the hot topics of language teaching research both in foreign and domestic.As a window for language input,English reading plays an important role in English learning.The teaching of English reading is closely related to the cultivation of critical thinking.Based on the cultivation of critical thinking,this study analyzes the main current situation of cultivation of critical thinking,existing problems and causes of these problems in English reading class.Also,this study puts forward some suggestions about it.The research questions of this study are:1)What is the current situation of students' critical thinking cultivation through teachers' questioning in senior high school reading instruction?2)What are the existing problems of teachers' questioning which aim to cultivate critical thinking skills?3)What are the causes that lead to the above existing problems?In order to solve these problems,the author adopted questionnaire toexplore the status quo of teachers' questioning to cultivate students' critical thinking.Classroom observation method is used to observe the 15 English reading lessons,according to the kinds of questions,questions response way and strategy of questioning to analyze the existing problems of the teachers questioning witch aim to cultivate the critical thinking.Finally,the author use interview method to visit the teachers mentioned above to investigate the causes of the existing problems.The study found that the current situation of teachers training students' critical thinking by asking questions in high school English reading classes is that the proportion of students' critical thinking sub-skills is not evenly distributed.The problems existing in the questions witch aim to cultivate the critical thinking skills through teachers' questioning are as follows: in terms of the types of questions,teachers' questions in critical thinking skills are more focused on interpretation,reasoning and explanation,and less on evaluation and self-regulation skills.In the way of answering questions,teachers prefer to assign students to answer questions,so students are in a passive thinking position.In terms of questioning strategy,the proportion of teachers using probing is the largest but the quality of questioning is not very high.The reasons are divided into internal reasons and external reasons.Internal reasons: 1.Teachers' understanding of critical thinking is notclear and comprehensive.2.Teachers' understanding of the role of questioning in critical thinking is insufficient.3.The teacher-centered classroom can hardly stimulate students' interest.External reasons: 1.Students' lack of language ability hinders the cultivation of critical thinking.3.The examination system of critical thinking is not complete under the examination system.