Examination Of The Cognitive Level Of Reading Comprehension Questions In Senior High School Textbooks And College Entrance Examination Based On Bloom’s Taxonomy

Thinking ability took its debut in the NECS and was identified as a very important key competence that students should develop and promote through English classes.With the purpose of achieving alignment in teaching objectives,teaching materials and evaluation to fulfill the cultivation of students’ thinking abilities,questions of the reading tasks in textbooks and College Entrance Examination are analyzed based on the revised Bloom’s taxonomy.Content analysis is first adopted to analyze questions in Book4 and Book5 issued by People’s Education Press,as well as the English papers of the 2018 and 2019 College Entrance Examination,and then individual interviews with teachers are carried out to restore authentic reading teaching,aiming to answer the following research questions:1)How do the questions in reading materials of textbooks demonstrate different cognitive levels?2)How do the questions in reading comprehension of College Entrance Examination demonstrate different cognitive levels?3)How do the cognitive levels demonstrated by textbooks and exam papers influence English reading teaching?The study shows: 1.The reading questions of the textbooks cover all the cognitive levels of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy,basically reflecting the cultivation of students’ thinking abilities required by the NECS.2.The setting of the questions at different cognitive levels are imbalanced and an overemphasis on the lower-order cognitive abilities is clearly found.3.No progression between the two textbooks can be seen.4.An overwhelming majority of the questions are at lower-order cognitive levels in College Entrance Examination.5.Textbooks and tests do not align well to the teaching objectives.6.Cognitive levels distributed by the questions in the textbooks and exam papers show a dominant influence on reading teaching,which,somewhat goes against the requirements of the cultivation of students’ thinking abilities.The study looks into the current situation of the cultivation of students’ thinking abilities in English reading classes,providing the teachers,textbook and exam compilers and students with practical suggestions to implement the cultivation of students’ thinking abilities,making it a reality in class that “most of the students are learning at a higher-order level”(Bloom,1956).