Is the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Revisited in the EFL/ESL Reading Textbooks?

Abstract

Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues produced a cognitive model for classifying educational objectives. This model has not been properly utilized by teachers and university instructors in their teaching settings. This cognitive model covers six main levels as knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation which, after knowledge, were displayed as skills and abilities, with the fact that knowledge was the essential prerequisite for putting these skills and abilities into practice. In the taxonomy, each category bears a continuum from concrete to abstract and simple to complex. In 2001, a group of cognitive psychologist revisited and modernized Bloom’s Taxonomy for teaching, learning, and assessment. Accordingly, the revised Bloom’s taxonomy drew attention away from the partially passive image of educational objectives and hints on a more active conception of categorization. The revised taxonomy employs verbs and gerunds to refer to cognitive levels unlike the nouns employed in the original taxonomy. The dynamic words in the revised taxonomy define the cognitive processes through which thinkers confront and work with knowledge. The learning goals are significant to form a pedagogical interchange in order that learners and instructors perceive the aim of that interchange. Having and classifying objectives support teachers in planning and supplying quality education, forming proper assessment tasks, and ensuring teaching to go parallel with the objectives. Hence, this research paper hints on investigating to what extent the revised Bloom’s taxonomy is employed in the reading comprehension questions of an EFL reading textbook. Thus, two research questions were developed to find out the state of cognitive skills stated in the revised taxonomy, the first question aiming at evaluating the lower level while the second one involving the higher cognition level. The investigated EFL reading textbook was analyzed through descriptive content analysis. The findings of the study showed that the examined textbook lacked the higher level cognitive skills highlighted in the revised version of the taxonomy. Related assumptions have been accordingly provided to recommend how the reading textbooks which are being written or will be written should be integrated with the revised Bloom’s taxonomy when assessing reading skills.