introduction

It emphasizes the requirements of the new high school curriculum standards for improving students' thinking quality, and points out that English courses should cultivate students' logical, critical, innovative and other thinking abilities. The article analyzes the current situation and problems of cultivating students' thinking qualities in high school English textbooks, and explores the impact of textbook task design on the cultivation of students' critical thinking skills. Meanwhile, four related research articles were introduced, exploring the cultivation of thinking qualities in textbooks from different perspectives. The article believes that critical thinking ability is an important component of students' core literacy, and textbooks are crucial for developing students' critical thinking ability. The research aims to provide suggestions for frontline teaching and textbook revision, in order to better cultivate students' critical thinking abilities.

The ability to think critically while reading

In depth exploration was conducted on the application and development of critical thinking skills in the reading process, emphasizing the need for students to use skills such as analysis, integration, differentiation, summarization, reasoning, and analysis to process textual information and author viewpoints in reading. Drawing on the experience of German textbooks, a critical thinking skills framework suitable for analyzing and evaluating the design of reading tasks in textbooks has been proposed. By comparing Chinese and German textbooks, it is found that there is room for improvement in the cultivation of critical thinking ability in domestic textbooks. At the same time, according to the requirements of the new high school curriculum standards, the critical thinking ability requirements that high school students need to achieve have been extracted, among which analytical ability cultivation requires the most. Finally, by comparing the requirements of the curriculum standards with the original analytical framework, it was found that the two basically correspond, providing guidance for the cultivation of critical thinking ability in high school English textbooks.

research design

This chapter introduces the research design, focusing on the three compulsory high school English textbooks for A and B in China, and emphasizing the critical thinking skills that students generally need to achieve. The research focuses on the design of reading tasks, selecting the reading module from the textbook and the reading section from the reading and writing module. The research team members independently coded based on the analysis framework, discussed the divergent codes, and determined the final code.

Research Results and Discussion

A detailed analysis was conducted on the modes of cultivating critical thinking ability in the reading section of two sets of high school English textbooks, and it was found that both textbooks attach great importance to the cultivation of critical thinking ability, with analytical tasks taking the lead, followed by reasoning and evaluation tasks. A textbook focuses more on cultivating students' ability to analyze text features, writing techniques, writing purposes, and author attitudes, while B textbook tends to directly inform students of the format, content, and language expression of discourse writing through text or textual prompts. In terms of cultivating reasoning ability, both sets of textbooks have the problem of insufficient cultivation of deep questioning ability. In terms of evaluating ability cultivation, the two sets of textbooks mainly focus on the evaluation of thinking outcomes, but pay insufficient attention to the evaluation of thinking processes and the credibility of information sources. Textbook editors and teachers need to continue exploring more types of tasks to promote the comprehensive development of students' evaluation abilities.

Conclusion and Inspiration

This chapter points out that there are similar patterns in cultivating students' critical thinking abilities between two sets of high school English textbooks, but there are shortcomings in the cultivation of analytical, reasoning, and evaluative abilities. It is recommended that teachers use or adapt textbook activities based on students' situations, understand the purpose of the activities, supplement reasoning and evaluation activities, and promote the comprehensive development of students' critical thinking abilities. At the same time, it provides reference for textbook revision, promotes comprehensive consideration of critical thinking skills, and adjusts the proportion of activities.