Cultivating Thinking Capacity
——taking my class as an exmple
Cultivating thinking capacity is a fundamental task for English teaching of Senior High school students. It is stated in General Senior High School Curriculum Standards English (2017 version, revised in 2020):
Cultivating thinking capacity helps students enhance their ability to analyze and solve problems, observe and understand the world from a cross-cultural perspective, and make correct value judgments on things.
There is no doubt that thinking capacity plays its role in every aspect of English learning. That is to say, it is not a skill as one of language competence, but a solid capacity which functions both as language capacity and learning strategy. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to cultivate it while teaching the four skills like listening, speaking, reading and writing, meanwhile, teachers should teach it as a tool for solving problems when students need to fulfill tasks associated with these skills.
To solve a problem, analyzing it is the first step. For example, when composing an article which is as part of the examination in NMET, students should first of all analyze the problem. To analyze a problem, they need an analyzing frame. Or, they would get lost and were not able to write the article clearly and logically. This means that the analyzing frame will of great help in guiding students to think clearly and logically, as a result of which, they can be also write clearly and logically. The analyzing frame is one of the thinking frames, which is the foundation for write a readable and comprehensible article. That is to say, to learn to write, students should learn to think.
With this idea in my mind, I didn’t rush to guide the students who had just finished a test to write the article sentence by sentence, but guided them to set up a thinking frame, that is, an analyzing frame. They should have been taught to think before they put their pen on paper.
The writing task is this:
假定你是李华。你所在的城市将举办“博物馆线上参观周”活动以庆祝“国际博物馆日”。请给你的美国朋友Tom简单介绍这一活动，内容包括：
1. 活动的目的与时间；
2. 活动内容；
3. 欢迎参观。
注意：1.写作词数应为80左右；
2. 可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
I guided the students who made some writing mistakes besides the mistakes in spelling, grammar and sentence patterns etc. to set up analyzing frame first. For Senior Two students, it is proper to do so since in Senior One the correctness was emphasized, because they have trained during Senior One to be able to write with less spelling, grammar and sentence patterns mistakes. By asking some key questions, I guided the students to set up an analyzing frame for the writing task like this:
Theme: the museum visiting week online
Purpose: to celebrate the International Museum Day
Receiver :Tom, a friend from America
Body: to introduce the activities( time, purpose, contents,…)
Ending: welcome
By analyzing the task and outline of the letter, the students are clear about what to write and how to write. With the analyzing frame in mind, they are able to organize the article well, that is, they can write it clearly and logically. It is true of continuous writing after reading.
To save space, I will not present the concrete writing task here. But I have to tell you that by analyzing the task, the students came to realize that the whole passage( the given part and the parts to write) should consist of three parts:
Misunderstanding
Apology
Forgiveness
The Misunderstanding parts has been given and the ending sentence of which tells us that the possibility of becoming friends again lies in the app Facebook which tries to establish the relationship between the heroines. So one of them, the writer, makes efforts to reestablish the relationship by make a apology by making the use of the Internet app. The second part for the students to write focuses on the forgiveness and happy friendship between the two. By using the analyzing frame, students find the writing thinking method. They can easily work out the composition design and put their pens on paper with clear mind.
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