Research On Cultivating Critical Thinking Ability Of High School Students Based On Interactive English Reading Teaching

Critical thinking ability is a kind of advanced cognitive ability,which refers to the ability to use the dialectical thinking method to recognize and analyze problems from a rational perspective,and creatively to solve practical problems.Today's society is an era of complicated information,if high school students want not to blindly follow the views of others,but to firm their own stand,and to make correct judgments and choices,they need to have the ability to analyze and judge these information.Therefore,it is very necessary to cultivate and improve the high school students' critical thinking ability.However,high school English teachers grasp grammar knowledge and basic reading skills in reading teaching,emphasizing word interpretation and sentence translation,which obviously can not fully cultivate high school students' critical thinking ability.And the current survey shows that the overall critical thinking ability of high school students is in the middle and low level.Their critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition are relatively weak in English reading classroom teaching.It is same with their logic competency and the analysis and understanding of the text is still in the surface meaning.In the interactive reading classroom teaching,through the combination of top-down and bottom-up reading methods,students not only understand the surface information of the text,but also can find the essence through the appearance,as well as examine the author's viewpoint,text structure and words and sentences from the perspective of the judge,and then think independently,analyze,judge and observe the author's writing intention and the social phenomenon reflected in the text,so as to cultivate and develop the students' critical thinking ability.Although Huang Yuanshen(1998)and Wen Qiufang(2012)have raised the issue of absence of English learners' critical thinking ability in China and investigated the current situation of Chinese foreign language students' critical thinking ability,unfortunately,the domestic research on cultivating high school students' critical thinking ability is not enough,and the role of interactive reading teaching in cultivating high school students' critical thinking ability is still in the stage of theoretical discussion,and the corresponding empirical research is lacking.Therefore,this study will discuss the cultivation of high school students' speculative ability based on interactive English reading teaching.To achieve the above research goals,this study sets up the following two research questions:1.What impact does interactive English reading teaching have on the critical thinking disposition of high school students?2.What influence does interactive English reading teaching have on the critical thinking skills of high school students?This study selects Class Five(control class)and Class Six(experimental class),two parallel classes,in grade one of No.8 senior high school in Dalian Development Zone,Dalian,Liaoning Province,with a total of 82 students(40 students in Class Five,42 students in Class Six)to carry out a semester of qualitative and quantitative experimental research.Experimental class uses the interactive reading teaching,while the control class uses the traditional English teaching.Respectively before and after the experiment,test and compare the high school students' critical thinking ability in experimental class and control class by using CTST-CV and CTDI-CV,and then use the SPSS 22.0 to analyze the collected data.After the experiment,15 students from the experimental class are randomly selected for interview survey.The results show that after a semester of interactive English reading teaching,in the aspect of critical thinking disposition,the students' ability of truth-seeking,open-mindedness,self-confidence,inquisitiveness,and analyticity in the experimental class has been significantly improved compared with the control class.With regard to critical thinking skills,the students' ability of interpretation,analysis,evaluation and explanation is significantly improved than that in the control class.Although there are no significant differences in data in maturity,systematicity and inference,it has also improved to some extent.Moreover,in the interview,most students show that the interactive English reading teaching greatly improves their enthusiasm to actively think about reading articles and the logic of speech expression,and their critical thinking skills have also improved significantly.Therefore,it is undeniable that interactive English reading teaching plays a positive role in improving students' critical thinking ability,and the author hopes that this study has certain practical significance for the subsequent research on cultivation of high school students' critical thinking ability in English reading class.