Analysis Of English Textbooks Exercises’ Instruction And The Cultivation Of Senior High School Students’ Cognitive Ability

National English Curriculum explicitly stresses that, high school English class should focus on cultivating students’ English learning abilities such as using English to obtain information, processing information, analyzing and solving problems,especially cognitive thinking. English textbooks are one of the important tools to realize the goal of National English Curriculum in cultivating students’ English learning abilities. Students use the English textbooks to learn language knowledge and develop language skills. Teachers also use English textbooks to implement teaching.Studying English textbooks exercises’ instruction of cognitive thinking orientation is helpful for the English textbooks users to use the English textbooks reasonably.Effective use of English textbooks instruction in English learning can stimulate students’ interest and develop students’ cognitive ability. At the same time, it helps the textbook writers realize that the existing English textbooks have advantages and disadvantages in the development of students’ cognitive ability. It provides textbook writers with some references and opinions to develop English textbooks more close to the actual situation of students, and more fit for students’ cognitive ability development.There has been many years for the research of English teaching materials, but few researchers has involved into the research of teaching materials cognitive orientation.By using the Intensive reading assessment table which is made by Lingbiao Gao for evaluating the English textbooks and the textbooks corpus,this study analyzes the senior high school English textbooks’ characteristics in cognitive orientation. There are three research questions. Firstly, what are the cognitive-orientation words which are widely used in the English textbooks to facilitate students’ high level of cognitiveability? Secondly, what is the proportion of different level of cognitive thinking activities? Whether the proportion is reasonable? Thirdly, what is the form of cognitive thinking activity? Whether the questions are open enough to stimulate students’ high level of thinking in the English textbooks.The results show that:1. The use of cognitive-orientation words in the English textbooks is absent of diversity.2. There is more low level of cognitive thinking activities than high level of cognitive thinking activities in the teaching material.3. Too many closed and semi-closed questions in the English textbooks aren’t helpful to stimulate students’ high level of cognitive thinking. And at the same time the form of cognitive thinking activity is relatively singular.According to the results, the author puts forward some countermeasures:1.Teachers can add or change the cue words that inspire students cognitive ability according to actual needs.2.Teachers can delete, supplement or expand the teaching content if needed, in order to increase the proportion of higher cognitive thinking activities.3.Teachers can replace the teaching content and activities and increase the proportion of open questions.4. Teachers can adjust the teaching method and make the forms of activities more diverse.