Research On The Thinking Quality Content In Senior High School English Textbooks(FLTRP)

In the international environment,English is increasingly valued by the country and the public.The newly published English Curriculum Standard for General High School(2017)puts the key competence of English subjects as the specific goal of the English course and clearly lists thinking quality as an important part of the key competencies of English subject.Thinking quality refers to the ability and level of thinking in the aspect of logicality,criticalness and creativity,and it also reflects the core mental characteristics of the key competencies of English subject.As the core carrier of the course,the teaching materials are the important references of teachers and students in the classroom,and the cultivation of students’ thinking quality is closely related to the content and design of teaching materials.The new English curriculum standard has a new requirement for teachers,students and even the textbooks,and various presses are publishing the new English textbooks according to the new standard.This study selects the study tasks and assignments in the high school English compulsory and selective compulsory textbooks(student book)of FLTRP as research objects,to analyze and work out whether the study task sets and designs meet the requirements for the cultivation of thinking quality in English curriculum standard.This study launches the following research issues:1.What is the meaning and connotation of thinking quality? How to transfer the abstract thinking quality into specific cognitive skills or objectives?2.What is the current situation of thinking quality in the new high school English textbooks? Does the task setting support the cultivation of thinking quality? Is it characterized by the basic ideas and requirements of the English curriculum standard?3.Does the textbook still need to improve? How to improve? How to better cultivate students’ thinking quality through compiling and using textbooks?In response to the above research problems,this study first clears the connotation of thinking quality through literature reading and sorting,then this study will take the meaning and connotation and the cultivation requirements of thinking quality in curriculum standard as the analysis standard,and clearly but respectively distinguish the relevance and differences between the three levels and three dimensions of thinking quality.Then this study will combine the requirements of thinking quality and Bloom’s cognitive target classification to build an encoding analysis framework.This research will analyze the current situation of thinking quality in the textbooks by encoding the study tasks,and analyze whether the design and setting thinking training in the study tasks of teaching materials meet requirements of thinking quality to find out whether the new high school English textbooks provide effective teaching support for the cultivation of students’ thinking quality and whether the basic idea and requirements of the curriculum standard are characterized,to work out whether it is possible to fully cultivate students’ thinking quality.Through the coding analysis,it is found that from the perspective of overall distribution of high-order and low-order thinking training,the design and setting of learning tasks in the English textbooks is in line with the requirements of curriculum standard.The compulsory teaching materials meet the cultivation requirements of curriculum standard when focusing on the high-order thinking and its internal specific constitution;however,due to both the difficulty of the tasks and the level of the thinking quality are not high enough,the optional compulsory textbooks do not meet the requirements of thinking quality in the curriculum standard.There is a common problem in both compulsory and selective compulsory teaching materials.The distribution of the three dimensions of thinking quality in the learning tasks is unbalanced.There are too much thinking trainings in logical thinking,but the critical and creative thinking trainings are not enough.Through observation and analysis,it is found that the problems of the textbook are mainly reflected in two aspects,the content and the form of the tasks.The content of the tasks is too simple and the form is too closed.These two problems cause the thinking quality trainings in the textbook fail the cultivation requirements of English curriculum standard.In order to better carry out the basic concepts of English curriculum standard and better cultivate students’ thinking quality,this study proposes the following suggests according to the problems of textbooks: first,increase the complexity of the content and the difficulty of the task to improve the level of the thinking quality trainings;secondly,pay more attention to the openness of content to increase the opportunities of thinking;thirdly,design more open questions or tasks,such as exploratory tasks,evaluative tasks,divergent tasks and other open tasks,to increase the frequency of thinking quality trainings and to fully cultivate students’ thinking quality.