An Empirical Study of the Effect of Inquiry Teaching on the Development of High School Students' Critical Thinking Under the New Curriculum Standards

The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China has issued three guideline documents to encourage inquiry teaching to help students develop their ability to question, which is a defining feature of critical thinking. Two of the documents have clearly stated that English subject teaching should focus on building students’ thinking capacity. Critical thinking is an essential feature of building thinking capacity and a key element of the core competencies the English subject seeks to cultivate. This research measures the performance of students of two high school classes in the exams conducted at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the experiment period during which inquiry teaching was applied to enhance students’ critical thinking ability. The experiment results show that inquiry teaching can improve students’ academic performance in English study and help them better develop their language skills. The implementation of the inquiry design in teaching listening, reading, and writing conforms to the law that governs the development of critical thinking, and the adoption of inquiry teaching can promote the development of critical thinking.