Analyzing The Development Of The Thinking Skills In High School English Reading Instructional Plans

Education is an important activity of transferring knowledge. However, the functions are more than that. Training students’cognition is also important. Education should help students develop higher-level of cognitive ability. This thesis discussed some issues of cognitive ability through the analyses of 30 English reading instructional plans. Which level of thinking skills is paid more attention to in senior high school English reading instructional plans? What is the similarity and difference between pre-service teachers and in-service teachers?30 senior high school reading instructional plans were studied among which half of them were from teachers at school, and the other half of the plans are from students. They were examined using revised Bloom’s Taxonomy qualitatively and quantitatively.The results showed that most of the plans intended to train lower-level thinking skills, like Remember, Understand, Apply. The reading instructional plans from the teachers at school paid more attention to the training of students’thinking skills in the level of Remember and Understand, and paid a little of attention to the level of Apply. But they paid little attention in the level of Analyze, Evaluate and Create. The reading instructional plans from students in our major of our school trained students’thinking skills in the level of Remember, Understand, Apply and few of them trained Analyze, Evaluate and Create. Implications for teaching English reading in senior high school were discussed.