An Action Research On Developing Junior High School Students' Critical Thinking Through Application Of Graphic Organizers In English Reading

The teaching of English reading is a core method to cultivate students' critical thinking ability and improve the quality of their reasoning.As an effective method to cultivate students' critical thinking,the graphic organizer has been widely used in language teaching.This paper primarily studies the following two questions:1)How to use different graphic organizers to improve junior high school students' ability of analysis and reasoning,summarizing,and evaluating?2)What are the different effects for students of different levels on their analytical reasoning ability,summarizing ability,and evaluation ability when they apply graphic organizers in their English reading?The participants of this research are the 9th-grade students from a middle school in the Xicheng District of Beijing.The researchers used questionnaires,examination papers,and semi-structured interviews to study and discuss the two research issues.Finally,the data collected were tested.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:1)Applying graph organizers can effectively improve students' abilities to analyze and reason,summarize,and evaluate.2)The application of graphic organizer leads to a significant change in improving the critical ability of students with higher or lower English proficiency,while it is not obvious in improving the critical ability of middle-level students.It is further found that students with higher or lower English proficiency are more likely to use simple graphic organizers to solve inferential and thematic problems in reading comprehension,while students with medium English proficiency are more likely to rely on text alone in solving reading comprehension problems due to proficiency constraints.According to the summary,different graphic organizers used in the teaching of English reading can effectively cultivate students' critical thinking ability.