A Study of Senior Students’ Critical Reading Competence via Analyzing their Reading Reports

Abstract

As a necessary step of thesis writing, students are required to read the related literature concerning their chosen topics for writing research papers. In order to understand how the students have reviewed the literature and whether they have understood the conventions of reading and citing literature in their thesis writing, we assigned students to write a reading report of 1500 words. Among the 90 reading reports she has collected, the author has randomly selected 35 copies for analysis. There are 9 pieces on the topic of literary studies and 15 pieces for language teaching, 4 pieces on translation and 7 pieces on culture. In the 35 pieces of reading reports, it was found that only eleven pieces have cited from previous researches and most of the citations appear in reading reports on teaching methodology and translation. It is a pity to notice that there were no indications of citation in reading reports of literary works where many critics have done researches. Although some reports contain some topics, like the use of imagery in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gothic element in Wuthering Heights, humanitarianism in A Tale of Two Cities, most students focus on summarizing the main plots of literary works. As for the types of information source, out of the total of 233, only 68 belong to the secondary source, namely the journal articles or collected essays. Thus we may conclude that students’ critical reading competence is far from satisfaction and they still need to be guided as to how to read literature and how to evaluate the usefulness of the information they have found.