| The General High School Curriculum Standards（2017）has made core competence as the goal of students cultivation at the high school level in China.Thinking quality puts emphasize upon cultivating students’ critical thinking,problems solving and innovation ability.Critical thinking skills can improve students’ ability to analyze and solve problems and make correct judgment.However,English teaching is still test-oriented in high school,which makes students possess mechanical mind,and lack dialectical thinking.According to Piaget cognitive development theory,students in high school are at an important period for developing abstract thinking,deduction and reasoning.Reading,as an important way of language learning,can provide materials for the development of students’ thinking skills.Therefore,this paper explores the current development of students’ critical thinking skills in English reading in a Hohhot high school and whether there are significant differences in students’ English reading critical thinking skills in terms of different genders and different grades.This research includes three questions: 1.What is the current situation of high school students’ English reading critical thinking skills in the Hohhot? 2.Are there differences in high school students’ English reading critical thinking skills in terms of different genders and different grades? 3.What are the difficulties of improving high school students’ English reading critical thinking skills?This study based on 250 students and 6 teachers from grade one and grade two in a Hohhot high school.Research tools are respectively questionnaires,interviews,and classroom observations,and the collected data were analyzed by SPSS 26.0.The research has following conclusions:1.The critical thinking skills of participants in English reading were at mediate level,with a mean value of 3.38.2.There were significant differences between genders,but no significant differences between grades.3.For students,they have poor initiation in learning,over-reliance on teachers and the Internet,lack desire to explore knowledge,and the understand of critical thinking limited to improving their scores.For teachers,their teaching model are stereotypical and single,and put more stress on language knowledge and the improvement of grades,by contrast,the guidance of critical thinking is neglected in teaching activities.Based on above findings,there are some pedagogical implications and makes some suggestions for teachers in order to improving students’ critical thinking skills in reading classes.At the end of thesis,author gives the limitations of this study and the suggestions for the further researches. |
