Acorpus-based Study On The Cognitive Level Of Directive Discourse In The New Senior High School English Textbooks

In English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017)(hereinafter referred to as ECS(2017)),thinking quality is directly listed as one of the four core competencies.With the vigorous development of the new curriculum reform,schools and teachers place more and more focus on the cultivation of English learners’ thinking quality in English teaching.English textbooks play a very important and irreplaceable role in English teaching.They are important materials and means to achieve the objectives of English curriculum.Directive discourse are an important link to organize teaching content and teaching activities,which help teachers and students to better know the intention of activities.The analysis and evaluation of the directive discourse in textbooks is helpful for teachers and students to understand the requirements of curriculum standard for students’ learning,and can reflect the teaching philosophy and the training of students’ cognitive level in the textbooks.As one of the most widely used English textbooks in China,New Standard English textbooks published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2019(hereinafter referred to as NSE(2019)),which is complied according to ECS(2017)also empathizes the cultivation of students’ cognitive ability.Meanwhile,Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of educational objectives divides people’s cognitive process from low level to high level into six levels:remembering,understanding,applying,analyzing,evaluating and creating.These six levels are from low to high,from shallow to deep.Bloom’s classification of cognitive levels can be used to categorize the directive discourse to understand the current situation of the cultivation of students’ cognitive level in the textbooks.This study uses the methods of corpus-based analysis and content analysis to conduct a study on the cognitive levels reflected by the directive discourse in NSE(2019)(Required Book 1-3)by searching the determined words at different cognitive levels,so as to answer the following questions:(1)What is the overall distribution of different cognitive levels of directive discourse in NSE(2019)senior high school English textbooks?(2)What characteristics does the directive discourse in NSE(2019)show?(3)Could the new textbooks meet the requirements of new curriculum standard in terms of cognitive demand?The result indicates that firstly,the distribution of the directive discourse at six cognitive levels in NSE(2019)is relatively even and balanced,which indicates that NSE(2019)editors place focus on cultivating student’ different cognitive thinking abilities.And the directive discourse at understanding level account for the largest proportion and those at analyzing level account for the least proportion.Moreover,the amount of the directive discourse at low cognitive levels is significantly more than that at high cognitive levels.Secondly,most of the words used in the directive discourse of NSE(2019)are common and familiar to students.There are many“you” and “your” in the directive discourse to create a suitable and comfortable context for students to understand the textbooks and conduct thinking activities freely.In addition,the directive discourse in NSE(2019)have a variety of forms and most of them are interrogative sentences and imperative sentences,which shows that the directive discourse in NSE(2019)is easy for students to understand.This can attract students’ interest in exercises and activities in textbooks,promote students involvement,and improve teaching efficiency.Thirdly,the distribution of cognitive levels reflected in the directive discourse of NSE(2019)basically meets the requirements of ECS(2017).However,the textbooks ignore the cultivation of students’ comparative ability and the ability to explore the reasons among different language and cultural phenomena.Therefore,there is still room for improvement.Accordingly,this study suggests that textbook editors should try their best to increase directive discourse at high cognitive levels to enhance students’ all-round cognitive development.Teachers should appropriately extend and design activities that can cultivate students’ analytical and comparative abilities.And students themselves should make full use of the textbooks and supplementary learning sources to train their high-level cognitive thinking ability and cultivate their own thinking quality.