A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOK BASED ON THE REVISED VERSION OF BLOOM’S TAXONOMY

Abstract

Textbook is one of teaching references used by teacher which provides activities; materials and tasks which help students to increase their higher level thinking. Therefore, tasks are also the essential tools to access students’ understanding of the learning material. Talking about accessing students’ learning, there are some studies that discuss about questions and objectives. Bloom’s taxonomy is one of the studies used to discuss about questions and objectives. Original Bloom’s taxonomy which was created in 1956 under leadership of educational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Bloom has been revised by Anderson and Krathwohl in 2001. Bloom’s taxonomy has three domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Cognitive domain involves knowledge and development of intellectual abilities and skill. There are six major categories in cognitive domain; remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. It is classified into two levels thinking; lower thinking level (remember, understand and apply) and higher thinking level (analyze, evaluate and create). This study which had a purpose to analyze reading comprehension questions in English textbook “English Zone” published by Erlangga, implemented content analysis design to describe and analyze the reading comprehension questions in the textbook. This research also used coding system to code materials based on the six major categories of cognitive domains. Documentary method was applied to collect the data from the English textbook of “English Zone” published by Erlangga. Then, the data obtained were analyzed by using the percentage to know the variation of the reading comprehension based on six major categories of cognitive domain. The result of the discussion showed two important things. First, reading comprehension questions in English textbook “English Zone” published by Erlangga covered all new revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy levels. They were remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Second, the reading comprehension questions were dominated by low order; (remember, understand, and appl) with 99 questions or 59.62% and lower order thinking; (analyze, evaluate, and create) with 67 questions or 40.35%. From this study, it can be concluded that English textbook “English Zone” published by Erlangga provides lower order thinking in reading comprehension questions aspect. It is suggested to the English teacher to construct and modify question items on reading comprehensions by including level of analyze, evaluate, and create while teaching in classroom that can encourage students to think critically and use high order thinking level. It is also suggested to the author and publisher to develop textbooks that foster high order thinking when writing the textbooks for senior high school students.