The Influence and Role of English Reading on the Development of Critical Thinking Ability of English Major Students

With the continuous improvement of the comprehensive ability requirements of college English education, the problem of over-emphasis on language knowledge teaching and neglect of thinking ability cultivation in traditional basic English teaching has become increasingly prominent. The existing teaching methods have obvious deficiencies in stimulating students' thinking depth, questioning spirit and logical expression. To this end, this paper introduces an English reading teaching model oriented towards the cultivation of critical thinking ability. Through systematically-designed multi-type teaching activities, including pre-class critical questioning, group discussion and debate, project-based PPT report, speculative writing and role-playing, it integrates task-driven and problem-oriented teaching concepts to improve students' critical thinking ability in five dimensions: analysis, interpretation, reasoning, evaluation and reflection. The experimental results show that the post-test scores of the experimental group students in each dimension are significantly higher than those of the control group (p<0.01), among which the analysis and reasoning ability are improved most significantly, indicating that this teaching strategy not only effectively improves the quality of students' thinking but also enhances students' learning motivation and comprehensive language application ability.