Evaluation of pedagogical impact of Business English textbooks on teaching critical thinking skills

Abstract

One goal of undergraduate courses in Business English is teaching critical thinking, but this goal has been hindered by disagreement over how to teach those skills. Many textbooks pay insufficient attention to critical thinking skills. It remains unclear how effective existing textbooks are in helping teachers teach these skills. In this article, we report on a study which uses the Knowledge Process framework to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate five textbooks in the Market Leader series. The presence of four knowledge processes in the textbooks is examined to see how effective the distribution of those processes is in teaching critical thinking skills. Although four knowledge processes are found in the textbooks, there is an imbalance among sub-processes, which leads to lack of scaffolding for teaching critical thinking skills. It is thus recommended that textbook developers and teachers design a sequence of scaffolded tasks to help teach critical thinking skills.