An Evaluation of Questions in Two ESP Coursebooks Based on Bloom’s New Taxonomy of Cognitive Learning Domain

This study aims at exploring the types and levels of questions inherent in two English for Specific Purposes (ESP) textbooks, namely, English for the Students of Sciences (ESS) and English for the Students of Engineering (ESE) taught in Iranian universities for several academic years. The objective of the analysis was to evaluate the questions in the light of the revised version of Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy of learning objectives (i.e., remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating). To this end, a coding scheme was developed and the data was codified based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Results from the codification of a total of 218 questions(100 questions in ESS and 118 questions in ESE) showed that most of the questions were aligned with remembering, understanding and applying as the three lower-level categories, while analyzing, evaluating, and creating as the three higher-level categories constituted the lowest frequency in the two textbooks. However, the chi-square test did not show a significant difference between the textbooks in terms of the six levels of cognitive domain. The results indicate that the abovementioned textbooks fail to engage learners in the questions requiring higher levels of cognitive learning objectives. By implication, textbooks developers, educational decision-makers, and syllabus designers need to incorporate more higher-order questions and modify their materials in such a way as to achieve higher levels of learning objectives. Moreover, this study has opened new avenues for further research in the field of textbook evaluation.

Bloom’s New Taxonomy, Learning objectives, ESP textbooks, English for the Students of Sciences, English for the Students of Engineering