A Corpus-based Study Of Instruction In Junior Middle School English Textbooks

English teaching materials can not only provide teachers with the resources to teach knowledge and organize teaching activities,but also provide learners with information on language learning.As a material for students to study language knowledge and develop language skills,we found that 98% of classroom teaching information comes from the textbooks that we use.Therefore,it is of great significance to analyze the English teaching materials.Instruction language is an important part of the teaching materials and it's also an important link between teachers,students and teaching activities.The analysis and study of teaching instructions can help teachers and students understand the requirements of curriculum standards,which are for students' learning.Besides,teaching instructions can also reflect the curriculum teaching ideas and students' cognitive levels implied in the teaching materials.The cognitive process of Bloom's Taxonomy(revised)is divided into six levels: remembering,understanding,applying,analyzing,evaluating and creating.The six levels are from low to high,from simple to difficult.As an important guiding language for students,the author thinks that the instruction language should be combined with Bloom's Taxonomy in compiling the content.The English Curriculum Standard for compulsory Education puts forward that the language skill is an important part of language using,mainly including listening,speaking,reading and writing.Listening and reading are skills of understanding,while speaking and writing are skills of expression.The four skills promote with each other in language learning and communication.This paper discusses the following questions: What's the distribution of each cognitive level? Whether the instruction language follow the law of cognitive development or not? What are thehigh-frequency verbs in the instruction language? What are the characteristics of these high-frequency words? Is the cognitive level reflected in the textbook matched with the New Curriculum Standard?The author builds a mini-enclosed corpus of instructions in PEP edition English textbooks.This thesis mainly uses Bloom's Taxonomy,corpus analysis and textbook evaluation theory.Based on the six cognitive levels of Bloom's Taxonomy(revised),this paper studies the instruction language from four aspects: listening,speaking,reading and writing.After retrieving,the quantitative data is analyzed by the method of corpus analysis,content analysis and graph analysis in detail.Then the author draws the following conclusions: firstly,the teaching material is distributed by six cognitive levels,and students can improve their cognitive abilities through the practice of different activities.While the layer-by-layer progressive problem of students' cognitive levels are not fully considered at the same time.Secondly,the material focuses on the low-level cognition,which is conducive to the development of students' solid basic knowledge.However,the instruction language has the problem of incomplete coverage with less high-level cognitive activities.Thirdly,the material basically presents the most common instruction verbs in middle school.But in the same level,the high frequency instruction verbs are single and lack the diversity in matching the new curriculum standard.