A Corpus-Based Study Of The Cognitive Level Of Directive Discourse In PEP High School English Textbooks

Under the drastic transformation of the educational world,a new version of high school curriculum standard was published in 2017 to keep up with the pace of development.Textbooks,as a crucial element in language teaching,need to be updated as well.The necessity was immediately sensed by the educators and starting from 2019,a new set of English textbooks are being released to respond to the call.As it is indicated in the curriculum standard,the arrangement of textbooks should attend to the aim of developing students’ cognitive ability.Therefore,the current research seeks to probe into the cognitive demand underlying the directive discourse and examine the extent to which the directive discourse could aid students in developing their cognitive skills.To make an evaluation on the directive discourse of listening,speaking,reading and writing sections in the new textbooks,three research questions are formulated as follows:(1)What is the cognitive distribution of the directive discourse like in each of the four sections?(2)What characteristics does the directive discourse of each cognitive level show?(3)To what extent do the new textbooks meet the requirements of new curriculum in terms of cognitive demand?In answer to these questions,a quantitative assessment and a content analysis are conducted on the collected directive discourse.Moreover,the results are also juxtaposed with the curriculum standard to arrive at more profound conclusions.Following are the findings of the present research:Firstly,although the distribution of the four language skills seems skewed if looked at separately,the overall distribution is fairly balanced out with only a slight tilt to lower order thinking.However,there are still discrepancies across the six cognitive levels.In addition,the data revealed there were both similarities and differences among the textbooks in terms of cognitive distribution.Secondly,the content analysis indicates that the directions in the new textbooks have a high density of the cognitive processes.Moreover,the cognitive demand of the directions could vary across sections or textbooks.And while most of the entries are diverse in form,some others,like those of the Remember and Evaluate levels,tend to lack variety.Thirdly,regarding the curriculum standard,the directions in the new textbooks could to a certain extent meet its requirements.Yet,some of the levels like Evaluate do not receive enough attention.In a nutshell,the textbook writers are expected to strategically design the textbooks to balance the cognitive distribution,so as to make it easier for teachers to creatively plan lessons and for students to effectively learn the language.As for the teachers,they should avoid being restricted to the textbooks,and instead customize the learning materials to make up for the cognitive imbalance in textbooks.Besides,teachers could also consider checking the cognitive distribution of their lessons before they finalize the teaching plans.As for students,it is recommended that metacognition should be developed to strategically allocate attention in class and efficiently guide self-study after class.