As a way of thinking, critical thinking aims at making accurate judgments, aiming at well-founded judgments and adopting appropriate evaluation criteria to determine the true value or advantages of things (Critical Thinking Community, 20 15). Critical thinking makes people think actively and creatively, rather than simply obeying authority or custom. English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School (Experiment) (Ministry of Education, 2003) points out that English teaching in senior high school should focus on cultivating students' critical thinking ability.

Argumentative writing is a high-quality material to cultivate students' critical thinking, but there is a lack of argumentative text suitable for cultivating students' critical thinking in senior high school English textbooks. Take 1-5 as an example. 25 main courses include 15 narrative and 7 expository, while the other 3 courses are dialogues, lacking argumentative genre. Therefore, the preparation team chose 1995 Reading Comprehension C of Beijing Volume of National College Entrance Examination as the teaching material of this training meeting (see appendix).

The style of this material is argumentative. The central topic is whether we should support animals kept in zoos. The article has clear structure, clear arguments, arguments and conclusions. The article begins with a rhetorical question, which shows the author's view that it is unfair and disrespectful to keep animals in cages. The second and third paragraphs begin with the statement that zoos claim to care for and save endangered animals, and then the author refutes the statement by facts, examples, research findings and data. Finally, it is concluded that people should support organizations that protect animal habitats rather than zoos. The author uses good argumentation skills when demonstrating his own views, such as using research results to increase the persuasiveness and credibility of the article. However, some of the author's expositions are not objective enough, the language expression is too absolute, and some words are obviously exaggerated. This text is suitable for cultivating students' consciousness and ability to look at problems dialectically and critically.

After the material is integrated and adapted, the total length of the full text is 23 1 word. Some new words, such as zoonosis, can be inferred from the context, and the vocabulary is not difficult. Some long and difficult sentences may affect students' understanding, such as rhetorical questions at the beginning of the article. Considering the clear structure of this reading material, the lesson preparation team decided to adopt a combination of students' independent reading, recording key information, independently constructing article form schema and group cooperation and sharing, so that students can learn, explore and experience themselves, have a dialogue with the text, enrich themselves, actively think, analyze and appreciate the text independently in reading activities. On the basis of reading to meet the individual needs of students, the classroom presents the diversity of thinking and truly returns the classroom to students.

2. Student analysis

The theme of this text is zoos and animal protection. Students are familiar with this topic and basically have the experience of going to the zoo and related experience. At the same time, high school students' judgments and opinions on some things have basically formed, and they can collide with the author's thinking from the aspects of background knowledge, life experience and thinking ability, which forms the best educational opportunity to cultivate critical thinking. Since this observation activity is a borrowing class, the optional teaching objects are students in Grade One and Grade Two, and the final preparation team chooses students in Grade Two. There are three reasons: first, the material comes from the college entrance examination questions and is suitable for senior three students. After the integration, it is more suitable for senior two students in vocabulary and understanding ability. Secondly, senior two students have a wide reading range and a broad vision. They usually learn about some wild animals and captive animals through TV, documentaries, reading materials and newspapers. Third, senior two students have a wider perspective and a certain depth of thinking. They have better independent thinking and rational thinking ability, and can better make personal judgments on the content of the article.

3. Teaching objectives

Based on the analysis of the teaching content and students' situation, the lesson preparation team positioned this course as a reading class focusing on cultivating students' critical thinking ability, and set the following teaching objectives:

(1) can identify and understand the author's attitude and views on raising animals in zoos through fast reading; Through careful reading, get and understand the author's arguments, arguments and conclusions, record them with keywords, and show the logical relationship in the form of mind map and explain them.

(2) Being able to evaluate the author's arguments, opinions and conclusions through critical reading, adjust and enrich personal opinions, and share and express them.

4. Instructional design concept

(1) The thinking process of preparing lessons

Under the severe situation of English reading teaching mode in senior high schools, as a lesson for Beijing to participate in the national high school English teaching observation training meeting, we should make a breakthrough in the mode and provide new ideas for English reading teaching.

① Develop students' deep thinking.

In the current English reading teaching in senior high schools, reading only stays at the level of information extraction, and insufficient attention is paid to developing students' deep thinking.

The lesson preparation team decided to focus on cultivating students' critical thinking ability in this reading class and let them become active readers. Teachers guide students to ask reasonable questions about any statement that may lead to conclusions, look for strong evidence, and then develop the habit of independent thinking.

In the whole reading process, students have been in critical thinking: from determining the main points of the article, to obtaining evidence to support the points, and finally finding the author's conclusion, teachers have always encouraged students to think and interact with the text. On the basis of understanding this information, students will compare the content of the article with their own experiences and constantly ask themselves: Is the content of the article consistent with my ideas or contradictory? What point does the author want to make? What reasons does the author give? Am I convinced by these reasons? What is my basis? What conclusions have I drawn by myself? Is my own opinion convincing?

In this series of questioning, collision and adjustment interactions, students have carried out a lot of positive thinking activities, and the training of critical thinking runs through the whole reading class, which subtly strengthens and promotes the critical thinking consciousness of middle school students.

② Pay attention to personal reading experience.

English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School (Experiment) (Ministry of Education, 2003) requires that English teaching should further clarify students' learning objectives, cultivate students' autonomous learning and cooperative learning abilities, and form effective English learning strategies. The design and implementation of English courses in senior high schools will help students to optimize their English learning methods, so that they can give full play to their learning potential, form effective learning strategies, improve their autonomous learning ability and form their own learning methods and styles through active learning methods such as observation, experience and inquiry. However, at present, the teaching process of English reading in senior high schools is too simplistic and superficial, paying more attention to results, ignoring the process of reading experience and paying insufficient attention to personalized reading.

The lesson preparation team decided to adopt personalized reading in this class to give students the right to read. Reading activities pay attention to students' autonomous learning, and turn reading activities into activities of students' self-exploration and self-experience, so that students can actively think, grasp, analyze and appreciate the text independently in reading activities, and make reading activities based on students' autonomous activities.

The central topic of this reading article is whether zoo animals should be supported. The main line of this lesson is to understand the author's views, arguments and conclusions on this topic. In the information input link, the teacher gives students enough time and space to read quietly, and obtains the author's views, argumentation process and conclusion on the topic in the form of notes. In the process of reading, students have an overall perception and grasp of the text, experienced the author's complete thinking process, and also enriched their knowledge and understanding of the problem of captive animals in zoos in the dialogue and exchange with the text, paving the way for the formation and expression of personal views. The whole class is a process of enriching and expressing one's true thoughts.

(2) Classroom teaching activities

After clarifying the teaching objectives and main lines of this lesson, this lesson mainly designs the following teaching activities:

① Activate schema to form reading expectation. Students can activate their background knowledge and experience about zoos and animals and express their views by watching animals in the natural environment and zoos. At the same time, under the guidance of teachers' questions, students form the expectation of understanding the author's point of view through reading.

② Establish discourse schema to deepen understanding. Students read independently, identify and summarize the author's viewpoints, arguments and conclusions, and understand the main contents of the article; At the same time, by recording keywords, drawing different mind maps, showing the logical relationship of the text, the text information is transformed into visible image information, so as to perceive the internal semantic relationship of the text as a whole, promote deep understanding, and establish the formal schema of the argumentative paper.

③ Enrich the schema and establish personal understanding. Students revise their understanding of the text through group sharing, then read critically, express their views on the author's point of view combined with personal background knowledge and life experience, and objectively evaluate the author's point of view, thus forming their own independent thoughts and opinions.

(3) the adjustment of teaching content

For the students who have just entered the second year of senior high school, this reading material is a bit difficult in terms of vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure. Therefore, the lesson preparation team made the following adjustments to the reading materials:

The Treatment of New Words in (1) Text

Because it is a college entrance examination reading article, some words in the article are new words of senior two students, and the context can't provide enough clues to help students guess the meaning. Therefore, in the reading materials, teachers have marked Chinese definitions for new words such as bar, claim and animitting.

② Handling of complex sentence patterns

In early teaching, teachers found that few students mentioned the role of captive animals when identifying and summarizing the author's arguments. After class, I communicated with the students and found that the sentence "endangered species bred in captivity did not fail in the process of being sent back to the wild." The third paragraph of the article created an obstacle to understanding, so the students avoided talking about it. Because this class is mainly a thinking training class, the teacher does not want to interrupt the coherence of students' thinking activities, so it does not involve too many explanations of long and difficult sentences. Therefore, after discussion with foreign teachers, the lesson preparation team adjusted the sentence to: captive breeding has not been introduced into the endangered category and returned to the wild.

③ Treatment of article length

Because this class is 35 minutes long, in an English reading class with the goal of cultivating thinking ability, students must be given enough reading time and thinking time to ensure the effect of teaching objectives. At the same time, the learning mode of reading and recording key information independently increases the demand for time. Therefore, after careful discussion, the lesson preparation team agreed to delete a paragraph in the third and fourth paragraphs of the original text. In the end, we chose to delete the third paragraph and keep the fourth paragraph because the content of captive breeding in the fourth paragraph can better cultivate students' critical thinking ability.

Third, the teaching process

Step 1: Import

1. The teacher played two videos for the students. The first paragraph is a video of wild African cheetahs running freely. Students can fully feel the speed of cheetahs. The second paragraph is a video of a leopard pacing back and forth in the zoo. What the students feel is the anxiety of the leopard. After the students watched the first video, the teacher asked: How do you feel after watching the video? A: Excited. I feel its speed and strength. The teacher kept asking: Where does it live? A: In its natural habitat. Next, the students watch the second video. Teacher's question: How do you feel after watching the video? A: I feel that leopards are bored and anxious. The teacher kept asking: Where does it live? Student: In the cage.

2. The students simply express their personal views on the animals kept in the zoo. The teacher asked: What do you think of keeping animals in cages? Let the students discuss in groups. After the discussion, the teacher encouraged the students to express their views. At the same time, the teacher recorded the students' views on the blackboard. Students activate their own experience in the collision with their peers and stimulate their interest in reading.

[Design intent]

Two videos about wild animals and captive animals make students intuitively feel the difference between wild animals and captive animals, and make students feel excited about the wisdom and natural beauty of wild animals, but also lament that captive animals have lost their freedom. After that, the teacher's "few words lead the students into the state and stimulate the sparks of students' thoughts" (note: extracted from the teacher's evaluation of this class on the WeChat interactive platform of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the competition site, hereinafter referred to as "WeChat platform").

Critical thinking is a process of obtaining information through multiple channels, synthesizing opinions from all sides, and forming one's own opinions through analysis and judgment. Students communicate in groups, share their opinions with the whole class, and the teacher records the students' opinions on the blackboard, all in order to make students contact with different opinions and opinions as much as possible, so as to prepare for in-depth thinking in the output link.

Step 2: Read the author's point of view

1. Read the full text quickly and answer this question: What does the author think of keeping animals in cages? The answer to this question is "it is unfair and unrewarding to keep animals in cages." From the first paragraph of the article. Then the teacher asked: What makes you think so? Some students find out the information in the article: it is mostly for entertainment. The teacher asked again, that's a good attempt. Can you find a better explanation? The students didn't find the key information quickly. The teacher led the students to read the first paragraph aloud together, and then continued to ask questions: Do you have a better answer? Student A: How could we possibly think that ...? The teacher affirmed the answer and pointed out that this sentence pattern is used to express strong doubts. Then the teacher asked: Do you have any different opinions? Who else will have a different opinion? Student A: Zoo or city zoo.

2. Students read the article quickly again and test their own inferences. The student's inference is correct: the zoo and the author hold different views.

[Design intent]

One of the basic skills of critical thinking is to identify the author's point of view (Cottrell, 20 1 1), and the purpose of this link is to let students find the author's point of view. The first paragraph of the article contains only one sentence, including "How can we possibly think of ...? "Special questions. This sentence is a long and difficult sentence in the article. First of all, this sentence is unfamiliar to students. In addition, this sentence also includes an object clause and an parenthesis. But this sentence is the source of the author's point of view. If students don't understand this sentence, it will affect the later reading and teaching goals. Therefore, the teacher here takes the students to understand this sentence together, and leads the students to experience the strong doubt expressed by this special question by reading aloud.

By asking the first question, the teacher makes students think about whether the content of the article is consistent with their own ideas. Students don't need to answer this question at once. The purpose of asking questions is to make students realize that reading an article is not only to understand the author's point of view, but also to interact with the author and even question the author's point of view.

Step 3: Read and write down key information.

1. Students read the article carefully and record the following information in the form of notes: the author's opinion, the zoo's statement, the author's arguments against the zoo's statement and the author's conclusion.

When teachers remind students to take notes, they can organize the above information in the form of mind map, table or flow chart (see the figure below) according to their own understanding.