A Study On The Beliefs Of High School English Teachers In Cultivating Students' Critical Thinking Ability

The High School English Curriculum Standards(2017)claims that the development of students' quality of thinking is one of the core qualities of English subject.Critical thinking,as one of the most valuable thinking qualities,is regarded as an important skill to cultivate new talents for the society.Hence more and more scholars argue that teaching critical thinking should become an explicit goal within English teaching so as to improve senior high school students' critical thinking skills.However,as an important influencing factor,teachers' beliefs in cultivating students' critical thinking skill have been paid little attention.Therefore,based on Blooms' Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain and the construct of critical thinking skills,this paper mainly uses questionnaires,interviews and classroom observation to analyze the teachers' beliefs and teaching behaviors on critical thinking in senior high school.The participants include 63 teachers.According to the data,the paper also analyzes the relationship between teachers' beliefs and behaviors.Then,it tries to find out the factors which affect the relationship between them.The results show that English teachers have positive and consistent beliefs in cultivating students' critical thinking skills.And all of them agree that the critical thinking plays an important role in English teaching.But teachers sometimes cannot follow their beliefs during the teaching practice and there are still some differences between their beliefs and behaviors.These differences are caused by various internal and external factors.The former one includes the pressure of tests,class time,evaluation methods,and the latter includes the negligence of critical thinking in the practical teaching.Based on the findings of the study,the paper puts forward the following suggestions.Firstly,English teachers should learn how to cultivate students' critical thinking through further study.Secondly,in order to make their beliefs correspond to classroom behaviors,teachers should frequently reflect on their own teaching beliefs and teaching behavior.Thirdly,schools and government should provide adequate support for the cultivation of critical thinking.There are five parts in this paper.The first chapter mainly introduces the background,significance and structure of this paper;the second chapter defines the concepts of critical thinking and teachers' beliefs,and it also reviews the literature about teachers' beliefs on critical thinking and the relationship between teachers' beliefs and behaviors;the third chapter clarifies the research questions,research methods and data analysis methods;the fourth chapter analyzes the quantitative andqualitative data and discusses the results of the data;the fifth chapter summarizes the whole paper and discusses the shortcomings of the study,and it also provides the suggestions for future research.In a word,according to the current teaching situation and the previous studies of critical thinking,this paper studies the English teachers' beliefs and the relationship between teachers' beliefs and behaviors.It is hoped that this study would provide some suggestions to the effective implementation of critical thinking teaching.