An Analysis And Evaluation Of Senior English Coursebooks Based On Cultivating Students’ Thinking Qualities

Senior English Curriculum Standard(2017 edition)puts forward English core competences and takes the cultivation and development of English core competences as the goal of senior English teaching and learning.Thinking quality,as one of the four English core competences,reflects the mental characteristic of English core competences.It refers to the ability and level of thinking in terms of logic,criticism and creation.Coursebooks are the carrier of Curriculum Standard and the main resources for teaching and learning.Therefore,they play an important role in cultivating students’ thinking quality.Based on the theory of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives(revised version),this study tries to analyze and evaluate PEP senior English compulsory coursebooks(2019edition)from the perspective of cultivating students’ thinking qualities.The research questions are as follows: 1.What are the distribution and frequency of thinking qualities in the coursebooks? 2.What are students’ and teachers’ opinions on the coursebooks in cultivating thinking qualities?In order to answer the above questions,the author used Cheng Xiaotang’s systematic coursebook evaluation method and made both internal evaluation and external evaluation on the coursebooks.In terms of internal evaluation,text analysis method was used to analyze the cognitive thinking levels of the learning activities in the coursebooks.As for external evaluation,the author investigated 196 students and 20 teachers through questionnaires.Besides,the author interviewed 5 of the teachers.After all the researches,the following results are obtained: First,it finds that there are 332 learning activities aiming to cultivate students’ thinking qualities,taking up 41%of the learning activities in the coursebooks.In most of the learning parts,students’ logical thinking,critical thinking and creative thinking can all be improved,but different learning parts always have different emphasis.Generally speaking,the coursebooks focus the most on logical thinking,more on critical thinking and the least on creative thinking.Specifically,from Book 1 to Book 3,the coursebooks show a downward emphasis in cultivating students’ logical thinking,an upward emphasis in cultivating students’ critical thinking,and a downward to an upward emphasis in cultivating students’ creative thinking.Second,students are most satisfied with the coursebooks in cultivating their logical thinking,followed by critical thinking.And they show the lowest satisfaction with the coursebooks in cultivating their creative thinking.Finally,teachers think the coursebooks do play a role in cultivating students’ thinking qualities.The design of thinking qualities in the coursebooks conforms to the law of students’ cognitive development.Most of the teachers make full use of the coursebooks to cultivate students’ thinking qualities.However,some teachers think the forms of learning activities which aim to cultivate students’ thinking qualities are not various.What’s more,the coursebooks do not show enough guidance in cultivating students’ thinking qualities.Though the coursebooks can meet teachers’ needs in cultivating students’ logical thinking well,teachers still need to make some other efforts in cultivating students’ critical thinking and creative thinking.