A Study On The Directive Discourse Of Reading Activities In Senior High School English Textbooks

Textbooks are the main vehicles for students’ English learning,and the reading part,as the most important part of the textbook,is undoubtedly an essential way to achieve the goals of thinking capacity.Directive discourses are vital parts of the textbook activities and direct reflections of the educational and teaching concept implied by a textbook.In 2019,the new version of PEP Senior High School English Textbook was published(hereinafter referred to as PEP(2019)).It is a series of textbooks written on the basis of the new curriculum standard and follows the latest teaching philosophy under the new curriculum reform.In General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 edition)hereinafter referred to as ECS(2017),thinking capacity is defined as one of four core competence.Moreover,it points out thinking capacity goals,that is “students should be able to comprehend and analyze specific linguistic and cultural occurrences,organize and synthesize information,create new concepts,analyze and infer the logic in information,judge all kinds of ideas,and express their own views creatively.Students should develop the ability to think in an open and creative way”.By analyzing directive discourses in the Reading and Thinking section in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3)based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy and the activity-based approach to English learning,this paper explores whether they can realize the thinking capacity goals required in ECS(2017)and the implementation of the activity-based approach to English learning.Three questions are posed in light of it.The research questions are as follows:1)What are the general characteristics of directive discourses in reading activities in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3)?2)What is the distribution of cognitive levels of directive discourses in reading activities in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3)?3)How is it consistent with the implementation of the activity-based approach to English learning in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3)?In this study,a miniature corpus of directive discourses in reading activities in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3)was established.With the help of corpus retrieval tool Ant Conc 4.0.9,the data were statistically collected and analyzed horizontally and vertically.The research results are as follows: 1)Reading directive discourses are dominated by interrogative sentence patterns,and most of them use weak strength modal verbs.Among them,“can” is used most frequently,and often appears with the second person “you”,which reflects the new curriculum concept of student oriented.2)Reading directive discourses set in the Reading and Thinking section in three books include all six cognitive levels of Remember,Understand,Apply,Analyze,Evaluate and Create,which is conducive to the development of students’ various cognitive abilities.However,these reading directive discourses are unevenly distributed,with the most at the Understand level and the least at the Evaluate level.According to the statistics of reading directive discourses in each textbook based on the development of low-order and high-order cognitive levels,it is found that more than half of the reading directive discourses in each textbook are at the low-order cognitive level,which is far more than the number of reading directive discourses at the high-order cognitive level.This shows that the three textbooks all pay more attention to the development of low-order cognitive levels and ignore the development of high-order cognitive levels.This also shows that the three textbooks do not reduce the development of low-order cognitive levels and increase the development of high-order cognitive levels with the deepening of learning.So it is difficult to achieve the development requirements of high cognitive levels such as analyzing,evaluating and creating required by the new curriculum standard.3)Through the analysis of the cognitive levels of reading directive discourses in different reading sections,that is pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading,it can be find out that the textbooks basically implement the concept of activity-based approach to English learning,including a series of learning activities such as learning and understanding,application and practice as well as transfer and innovation.In the pre-reading and while-reading,students’ understanding and perception abilities are emphasized,and after reading,students’ application and practice ability is emphasized,which also involves transfer and innovation.However,in general,the number of transfer and innovation activities is low,which is not conducive to the development of students’ creative ability.This study explores and analyzes the distribution of different cognitive levels of directive discourses in reading activities in PEP(2019)(Compulsory Book 1,2,3),in order to provide references for textbook editors in the compilation of textbook directive discourses as well as the actual teaching of the textbook by teachers,so as to promote the gradual development of students’ cognitive ability and realizing students’ thinking capacity goals.