Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills Through Ict in English Reading

This dissertation, "Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills Through ICT in English Reading" by Mei-yi, Lee, 李美儀, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: ABSTRACT Hong Kong is requiring a large number of workers who are good at communicating with foreigners in English. It is a must to raise the English standard of Hong Kong students in order to meet the need of the society. Reading is an essential requirement for the learning of the speaking, listening and writing skills of a language. It is also important for the promotion of lifelong learning, individualized and independent learning, collaboration and critical thinking skills, sense of appreciation, sense of participation or involvement in the reading process and taking responsibility for ones' own learning. It is unavoidable for life-long learners to read in the course of their study so as to understand ideas and concepts in texts, find relevant data and understand instructions and guidebooks. The government document "Learning To Learn --- The Way Forward" (EMB,2004) pointed out the importance of reading by putting 'reading to learn' into one of the four key tasks. There were three main objectives of this research. First, the correlation of ICT utilization and students' interest and understanding in reading were studied. Second, the possible ways of promoting critical thinking through ICT incorporated reading activities were sought. Third, the possible means to measure and record critical thinking were investigated. In this research, 32 students' abilities in the sub-skills, interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation, of critical thinking skills were tested before and after the research to see if the reading programme could help to improve students' critical thinking ability. Students' opinions about reading English stories were collected by means of questionnaires before and after the research. iiExperimental lessons were observed to see the effect of the reading and discussion tasks on the learning of the students. One subject teacher and five students were interviewed to collect their opinions about the reading project. At the end of the research, it was found that ICT could probably make on-line English stories more interesting and easier to be understood and thus arouse students' interest in reading English stories. It was also found that discussing thought provoking questions in the discussion forum about stories improved ones' critical thinking power. In the course of designing the tools for finding out students' critical thinking abilities, it was found that there were many commercially made critical thinking tests. Teachers might use them as reference and design their own tests. iii DOI: 10.5353/th_b2995379 Subjects: Reading (Elementary) - Computer-assisted instruction - China - Hong Kong Critical thinking - China - Hong Kong - Evaluation School children - China - Hong Kong