Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Critical reading
In this part, it refers to some related concepts and studies on Critical Reading.
2.1.1 Definition of related concepts
Definition of Critical reading
As a relatively new field of applied linguistics, Critical reading have been givenmany different views on its meaning. Critical reading first comes from psychology.Dewey (1910) put forward the idea of reflective thinking, which has a similar core tothe then-rising criticism in America, and five steps of thinking process are putforward, that is, producing doubt in the situation, identifying doubt, putting forwardvarious hypotheses of solving doubt, inferring hypothesis, and verifying ormodifying hypothesis. As what can be seen, the starting point of Dewey's thinking is"questioning," which means that students are not onlookers to situations, but activeparticipants.
Based on this theory, the concept of critical reading has been put forward inorder to cultivate students' critical thinking and improve their reading ability. Phillip(2002) holds that critical reading is a deep understanding of textual information, inwhich the reader needs to understand the author's true meaning and intentions ratherthan superficial textual information. And the reader cannot stop at the shallow levelof reading, but to fully explore the underlying meaning of the text, the meaning ofthe unfinished. Like Phillip’s view, Priozzi (2003) and Spache & Berg (1985) makesome investigations. The former believes that critical reading is an activity in whichthe reader decrypts text, while the latter defines critical reading as the ability toanalyze and make judgments while reading.
2.2 Studies on reading teaching
There are abundant studies on the research of reading teaching. In this part, wereview them at home and abroad.
2.2.1 Studies on reading teaching abroad
English reading teaching has a wealth of research results at home and abroad. Inwestern countries, English reading teaching research started early, with richtheoretical basis and practical experience. In the early 20th century, under theinfluence of traditional language teaching methods, teachers followed the experienceof reading teaching, teaching students vocabulary and grammar knowledge in theclassroom, asking students to do some imitation to obtain reading experience.
In 1930's, Bloomfield put forward the Structuralism language teaching method,which made English reading teaching develop from empirical teaching to structuralteaching. In the 1950s, influenced by Bruner's behaviorist psychology, he believedthat as long as teachers help students form correct language habits, students can readand use language. Since the mid-1960s, the development of psycholinguistics andcognitive psychology has made great progress in English reading teaching. Robinsonputs forward SQ3R reading learning method, namely Survey, Question, Read, Reciteand Revise. He thinks that reading is divided into two processes, one is the perceptualprocess based on language input, the other is the non-perceptual process based on thereader's own knowledge structure. Widdowson (1979) put forward a new proposal forlanguage teaching from the perspective of social psychology. He believed thatlanguage teaching should not only teach knowledge and skills, but also teach ability,and emphasized the importance of discourse in language teaching.
Chapter Three Research Methodology.......................... 18
3.1 Research questions.............................18
3.2 Research subjects.................................... 18
3.3 Research instruments.......................................... 19
Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion........................... 29
4.1 Analysis and discussion of Research Question 1..................................29
4.1.1 Analysis and discussion of the pre-test....................................29
4.1.2 Analysis and discussion of the post-test...
