高中英语教学中学生思维品质培养现状调查思考

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
With  the  rapid  development  of  the  globalization  and  information  in  the  21st century, new challenges have been brought to education and talent training. It was in 1997 that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development came up with the concept of key competencies: “This is an ability that transcends knowledge and skills. It involves the use and mobilization of all the psychological and social resources to work out complicated problems.” Against this background, in 2014, Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China proposed that a system of key competencies needed to be established and the new edition of Curriculum Standard for Senior High School was drafted. In 2018, English Curriculum Standard for Senior  High School (2017) was officially issued, and the development of students’ key competencies was considered  as  the  goal  of  English  curriculum.  The  key  competencies  for  English subject  are  made  up  of  the  following  four  parts:  language  competence,  cultural awareness, thinking quality and learning ability. In terms of thinking quality, students are required to comb and summarize information, draw the inference about the logical relationship of information and use English for independent thinking and divergent thinking.
Thinking quality is the focus of mental representation and the essential ability of students. It is necessary to explore the connotation of excellent Chinese and foreign cultures  through  language-based  learning  activities,  compare  their  similarities  and differences,  and  discover  and  absorb  cultural  essence  in  order  to  learn  language knowledge  and  cultural  knowledge  well.  The  activities  that  occurred  during  this process: analysis, judgment, and evaluation are all considered as thinking process, reflecting the quality of the learners’ thinking. 
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1.2 Purposes of the Study
Questionnaires and interviews are applied in this study to find out the current situation  of  thinking  quality  cultivation  in  senior  high  schools.  It  attempts  to investigate  the  current  situation  of  thinking  quality  from  the  three  dimensions  of thinking  quality,  namely logicality,  criticalness  and  creativity,  gender  difference  in thinking quality and factors that affect the cultivation of thinking quality. The research attempts to provide students and teachers with feedbacks and results of the current situation of the cultivation of thinking quality in senior high schools. In addition, it is hoped to give possible constructive suggestions for the cultivation of thinking quality in English teaching.

Table 3.2 Statistics of the validity of students’ questionnaire KMO and Bartlett’s Test 

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Key Concepts
2.1.1 Definition of Thinking
According to Lu (2016), thinking can be defined from broad and narrow sense. In a broad sense, thinking is the neural activity of an organism. All the organisms with a nervous system have the ability to think. In a narrow sense, thinking is the cognitive activity of the human nervous system. From a non-biological perspective, thinking is a high-level cognitive activity of human beings. 
Lu (2016) claimed that from the perspective of educational psychology, thinking is the psychological behavior shown in the interaction between human nervous system and environment. From the perspective of consciousness, people’s thinking activities are divided into three categories: unconscious thinking, subconscious thinking, and conscious thinking. First, unconscious thinking refers to the thinking activities shown by the instinctive reaction of the human nervous system when it is affected by the outside world, such as avoiding danger. Second, subconscious thinking is defined as follows: it is the thinking activity that human nervous system shows when people do not actively carry out conscious behaviors and are affected by the outside world. A considerable part of it is the thinking activity caused by cultural genes. For example, people show sadness when they hear The Moon Over a Fountain. Third, conscious thinking: this is the active thinking of the human nervous system after being stimulated by the outside world. It is the main form of human thinking and the main field in which the quality of thinking can be improved. We usually talk about conscious thinking. Based on the abstractness of thinking, people’s conscious thinking can be divided into three  types:  intuitive  action  thinking,  concrete  image  thinking  and  abstract  logic thinking.
In this study, thinking is defined as the conscious thinking from the perspective of educational psychology. Because of the abstractness of thinking, the study will not further  discuss  and  classify  the  conscious  thinking,  which  is  discussed  by  the psychologists. That is, thinking is the active thinking of the human nervous system after being stimulated by the outside world.  
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2.2 Theoretical Basis
2.2.1 Theory of Interaction between Thinking and Language
Language  has  been  widely  studied  by  cognitive  psychologists  and psycholinguists  for  the  following  reasons:  First,  the  development  of  language represents  a  unique  abstract  process.  Second,  the  process  of  human  thinking  and problem solving is a processing process that requires the participation of language. Third, human understanding of the world is also influenced by language expression. Theories can be found from Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition to Skinner’s belief  that  language  is  acquired  through  continuous  reinforcement  and  Bartlett’s anticipation of “the abstraction of linguistic thought”. Vygotsky (2010) argues that children’s  thinking  development  is  most  obvious  in  the  process  of  language development.  He  also  believed  that  language  and  thought  were  inseparable:  “The relationship between thought and speech is a living process. Thought is produced by words. A word without thought is a dead thing, and a thought is only a shadow if it is not reflected by the word. However, the connection between thought and speech is not realized or permanent. It occurs in the course of development, and the connection itself is evolving”. In Dewey’s opinion, “language is the tool of thinking”. Language itself is not the same as thought, but without language there can be no communication of thought. For thought itself, language is necessary. As for the “application of language in  education”,  Dewey  believed  that  “education  should  transform  language  into  a rational tool”, specifically, it should guide students’ language learning and make the language originally used as a social tool become a tool to spread knowledge and help thinking. Therefore, language and thinking have an inseparable relationship, and the development of language and the improvement of thinking ability complement each other. This paper studies the language teaching in senior high school to promote the improvement of students’ thinking quality. 
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Table 4.1 The performance in the three aspects and overall thinking quality