A Study Of The Thinking Quality Content In The Reading Exercises Of PEP Senior High English Textbooks

Thinking quality is listed as one of the core competencies in English Curriculum Standard for High Schools(2017).Textbooks are essential materials for implementing English teaching.Analyzing the design of reading exercises in textbooks helps to cultivate students’ thinking quality effectively and meet the requirements of the curriculum standard.This thesis takes the required selective textbooks(2019 edition)1-4 for high schools published by People’s Education Press as its research subjects,aiming at exploring the thinking quality content in the reading exercises of these four textbooks.The primary research methods are content analysis and interviews.It tries to answer the following research questions:(1)How does the distribution of thinking skills in the reading exercises of the PEP textbooks match the English Curriculum Standard for High Schools?(2)What kind of thinking skills and levels of thinking quality cultivation is emphasized in these reading exercises?Based on the three levels of thinking quality in the English Curriculum Standard for High Schools and the four thinking skills(Mei Deming et al.,2020: 72),the author established an analytical framework and used it to code and classify the thinking quality content in the textbooks’ reading exercises,and explore the distribution of its thinking quality levels.In addition,this study conducted interviews with 6 teachers from a senior high school in Guangzhou city to gain further insight into the practical application of reading exercises in classroom teaching.First of all,it is found that all the reading exercises in the 4 textbooks contain the content of various thinking skills and thinking quality levels.The proportion of each thinking skill and level is appropriate.The reading exercises focus on the development of thinking skills of observation and comparison as well as analysis and inference,and are also appropriately configured to develop students’ thinking skills of induction and construction as well as criticalness and innovation.The proportion of criticalness and innovation in reading exercises increases from Book 1 to Book 4.Secondly,the thinking skills in the reading exercises are relatively balanced,and the order of proportion of their levels is Level 1 > Level 2 > Level 3,which is in line with the positioning of the Curriculum Standard for required selective courses.In terms of observation and comparison,the reading exercises in textbooks focus on Level 2 of thinking quality.In terms of analysis and inference,induction and construction,and criticalness and innovation,the reading exercises focus on Level 1 of thinking quality.Last but not least,the interview shows that teachers do use the reading exercises to develop students’ critical thinking but they need to know more about how to explore the potential function of thinking quality development in reading exercises.Most of the teachers believe that there should be more reading exercises that target the development of critical thinking skills in the textbooks so as to promote high-level development of students’ thinking quality.