98
An analysis of elt coursebooks in terms of 21
st
century skills
textbooks and teachers’ resource books in another
study. Over nine ELT textbooks and eight teachers’
resource books, communication strategies included
the most were appeal for assistance and circumlo
-
cution /paraphrase. In addition, the findings showed
that textbooks seemed to promote communication
strategies less than the teachers’ resource books and
the activities presented in the textbooks were not ef
-
fective as they were desired to be. However, com
-
munication strategies introduced in the teachers’
resource books were not ideal either, which led the
researcher to conclude with a request of more high-
quality materials to be designed to teach communi
-
cation strategies. Another study that investigated the
coursebooks used in 11th and 12th grades in Mo
-
roccan public schools in terms of critical thinking
was done by Mrah (Mrah ,2017:230) [19] through
content analysis. The learning objectives of Bloom’s
Revised Taxonomy were addressed in each reading
task of ‘Ticket to English’ Level 1 and 2. In both lev
-
els, lower-order thinking skills were more frequent.
The cognitive category
understand
was the most
frequent one while there was no task promoting the
cognitive category
create.
The study, also, listed the
types of reading activities included in both course
-
books for each category of the taxonomy. In con
-
clusion, the author suggested some reading activity
types that could be included in the coursebooks to
foster higher-order thinking skills.
Wu and Pei (Wu and Pei,2018:80) [20], on
the other hand, analysed three coursebooks used
for intensive reading purposes in freshman year of
English Majors. The coursebooks to be analysed
were English through Culture (2004), Contem
-
porary College (2010) and Think English (2015).
The authors developed their coding scheme based
on Bloom’s Original Taxonomy with definitions of
each cognitive level, question words and patterns.
The questions in each reading task were identified
as simple and composite questions and they were
evaluated separately to see how the cognitive lev
-
els of Bloom’s Taxonomy were covered in simple
and composite questions. The study findings indi
-
cated that in all three books, the lowest cognitive
level of the taxonomy ‘knowledge’ was included the
most while ‘application’ level was the least. Another
finding revealed from the study was that the more
recently the book was published, the more activi
-
ties that promote higher-order thinking skills were
included.
Considering the other 2Cs of the 21st Century
Skills which are creativity and collaboration, the
current study is unable to present available studies
since the author could not find any on evaluating
ELT coursebooks in terms of creativity and collabo
-
ration. Moreover, available literature has provided
no studies regarding the coursebooks to be analysed
in the current study. As the related studies show, lit
-
tle research has been done to investigate the 4Cs of
the 21st Century Skills in ELT coursebooks. Having
stated in the previous sections, in the light of this
research, communication, collaboration, creativ
-
ity and critical thinking skills are analysed in ELT
coursebooks. The following section presents the
methodology which explains “how” this research
problem is investigated.
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