Textbook, Language And The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking Ability

Along with the development of educational innovation in China, college English teaching has experienced great changes in both its teaching material construction and classroom instruction. However, the majority of these endeavors still focus on merely the improvement of ways to enhance the learners'linguistic knowledge and language skills. The neglecting of learners'cognitive development (compared with their linguistic development), results in the lack of intelligence challenge in foreign language teaching classrooms and thus the loss of opportunity to train learners'higher thinking ability and, to some degree, the lack of opportunity to stimulate learners'enthusiasm to enjoy this intelligence success. Vygotskian sociocultural theory provides us with a new understanding between language and thought. For Vygotsky, the incorporation of tools or mediational means does not simply facilitate action that could have occurred without them, but rather, by being included in the process of behavior, alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions. He emphasized the importance of language in the development of higher level thinking during the goal-directed and language-mediated activities. As one of the most important psychological tools, the mediational language, used in text interpretation and exploitation and in orienting learners to and through their cognitive Zone of Proximal Development is of particular significance. Therefore, as a subject directly related to language, textbooks of college English, which are the main source of teachers'instruction of language, have their unique advantage on the contribution to cultivate the ability of higher level thinking, especially of critical thinking, which enables one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure thinking. It is a trainable but highly neglected and needed ability, whose proper use will help learners reach higher level of educational cognitive objectives.Texts in textbooks are not only a carrier of target language, information and culture, but the crystallization of writer's wise mental operations. As a kind of higher-order psychological tool, they are, according to Kozulin (2000), a supertool, supplying its readers with new instruments for the comprehension of life events and ways of thinking. In other words, texts can act both as the objective of learning and tools for learning. But the interpretation of the text varied with its different readers. In this sense, high quality text-related questions, which are believed to be the driving force and steering wheel behind thinking, become a very important part to be considered. Questions given after texts in textbooks can serve as a guide or director to teachers'especially students'reading and thinking and also the types of classroom interactions, the result of which is the gradual approach to the higher level of educational cognitive objectives (adapted from Marzano & Kendall, 2007) as well as the higher level of linguistic objectives, from only understanding and memorizing of the text content and language points to upwardly comprehension, analysis and knowledge utilization etc. What is more important for language learners, by genuine dialogue centered around the intelligent questions, by learning language through language, learners'interest in learning and communicative competence will also improve accordingly.So the purpose of this study was to do a case study exploring present critical thinking ability cultivation in college English textbook construction through examing questions after texts in two sets of college English textbooks. Research questions are as following.:1. What kinds of questions following texts in two sets of textbook can be classified into? How about the frequency of distribution for different questions? 2. What level of educational cognitive objectives can different questions reach? 3. Are there any differences in the distribution of different questions in the two textbooks? Are those differences vital in the cultivation of critical thinking ability? Based on the coding scheme adapted from former studies, all the questions collected are classified. With the taxonomy of educational cognitive objectives adapted from Marzano & Kendall (2007) as the key research tool, the study compares the two textbooks based on the percentages of different category of questions, with each category corresponding to certain level of educational objectives. The results show a clear difference of question distribution between two textbooks. One textbook has a high frequency of Authentic questions (AQ) which is believed to be more effective in fostering critical thinking, but the other one has a relatively lower one. Thus the result of the research calls for higher quality textbooks with good questions for the cultivation of critical thinking, so as to get some implications on the writing and using of textbooks, and providing a new perspective on teaching and learning of English.Modern education is featured as prospective, which is oriented toward a re-creation of fundamental problems rather than learning existent solutions. So it is the author's sincere hope that our language teaching will attribute to effective learning of students who can competently face the intellectual challenges of modern education.