Cognitive Thinking Skills Design In The Reading Exercises

Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standard(experiment) puts forward the requirements for high school English teaching, especially in English reading. It demands the English reading help students cultivate critical thinking skills. Textbook is the main source of students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. The exercise in the textbook plays a vital role in examination and teaching. This thesis aims to analyze and evaluate reading exercises in FLTRP Senior New Standard English, in the hope of finding out the advantages and disadvantages of the exercises, so that it can provide some advice for the compilation and use of exercises.Therefore, based on the Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, this thesis takes the FLTRP Senior New Standard English as an example, researched the reading exercises in the textbooks through quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, to answer these questions: What levels of thinking skills do the reading exercises show? What kinds of cognitive levels do reading exercises in senior high of different grades respectively emphasize? Do the textbooks 1 to 8 design the reading exercises from the perspective of cognitive process dimension and the requirements of thinking levels from easy to difficult?The results indicated that the reading exercises in the textbooks train multi cognitive thinking skills, including Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating. Different grades in high school emphasize different thinking skills. Overall, the requirements of thinking levels about exercises in eight textbooks are from easy to difficult. However, there are also some problems: reading exercises are to some extent lack of progressive training in cognitive thinking skills, and the design of reading exercises is not balanced enough, they overemphasize the student’s understanding but neglect the high-level thinking skills. On this basis, the study suggests that the reading exercises can be designed from different thinking levels, to make the exercises diversified; and it is essential to consider the grades and abilities of different students in real situation when designing the exercises; the exercises should cover all 6 thinking skills and arrange them in proper proportion, and the exercises should be showed from easy to difficult, to training students’ thinking skills gradually.