The objective of this research was to analyze several reading and writing methods used in educational settings, evaluating their pedagogical approaches and their effectiveness in the process of learning to read and write in school-age children. A systematic review was carried out in the open databases Dialnet and ScieELO, using different inclusion and exclusion criteria, which resulted in 164 documents, applying the PRISMA protocol, 20 were selected. A narrative synthesis analysis was carried out on the following dimensions: reading and writing methods, applied strategies, similarities with other methods and impact on the development of literacy. It is concluded that the combined application of the methods of synthetic and analytical approaches to reading and writing paves the way to attend to the diversity of learning styles, facilitates the strengthening of specific linguistic skills, and strengthens reading comprehension and writing competence.

The improvement of critical thinking ability is a process of human brain’s cognition, reasoning and judgment of objective things. This experiment starts with the learners’ discourse cognitive construction model, and attempts to study the effect of the training of discourse cognitive model based on critical thinking habits on the English writing performance of the application-oriented English majors with three different levels of language expression ability, so as to help the learners improve their English writing in the construction of conscious discourse cognition.