An Empirical Study On Critical Reading Strategies Applied To Senior English Reading Class

The English Curriculum Standards of General Senior High School(Ministry of Education,2018: 6)puts forward the new requirements on students' quality of thinking.That is,students are expected to distinguish the concrete phenomena in language and culture,sort out and summarize information,construct new concepts,analyze and infer the logical relationship of information,correctly evaluate various viewpoints,creatively express their own opinions,and finally form the ability of using English to think independently and creatively.However,in the current senior English reading class,most of teachers simply adopt the cramming teaching while the cultivation of students' critical reading ability has been neglected for long.By comparison,critical reading teaching puts much emphasis on students' involvement.In this model,teachers focus more on the training of students' critical reading ability.Therefore,it is urgent to bring in a new model of teaching.This study took the constructivism learning theory,schema theory and critical discourse analysis theory as its theoretical basis.By means of teaching experiment and relevant studies at home and abroad,this study attempts to explore the following questions: 1)whether the critical reading strategies training can enhance students' critical reading ability;2)whether the critical reading strategies training can help raise students' awareness of using the critical reading strategies;3)whether the critical reading strategies training can improve students' satisfaction towards English reading class and interest in English learning.The author conducted a one-term experiment between Class 5 and Class 6 in Grade10 from The Affiliated High School of FIE in Fuzhou by means of literature review,experimentation,questionnaire and interview.During this term,the method the author used in Class 5 was the critical reading teaching method,however,the method used in Class 6 was the traditional reading teaching method.The collected data throughout the experiment was analyzed by means of SPSS 13.0 software and the results of this experiment indicated: 1)the critical reading strategies training can enhance students' critical reading ability;2)the critical reading strategies training can improve students' awareness of applying the critical reading strategies;3)the critical reading strategies training can improve students' satisfaction towards English reading class and interest in English learning.To sum up,the author holds the view that it is feasible to apply the critical reading teaching to senior English reading class,which can also promote the development of relevant teaching theory and teaching practice.