A Study on the Cultivation of Higher-order Thinking Based on Activity Design in Senior English Textbook

Abstract

Under the background of core competencies, cultivating learners’ higher-order thinking is one of the directions of educational development. How to cultivate students’ higher-order thinking is a problem worth considering for teachers. At present, it has become a trend for teachers to pay special attention to the design of English learning activities in teaching design, but to some extent, they ignore the basic link of analyzing the activity design in teaching materials, and do not make good use of existing resources. Therefore, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and from the perspective of higher-order thinking, this paper conducts data statistics on all activities in Senior English textbook (2019 edition) by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, and analyzes the rationality and availability of textbook activities. It aims to maximize the role of textbooks and make full use of materials, facilitating teachers to develop students’ higher-order thinking through analysis and creative use of teaching materials. It is found that the textbook has rich levels of activities and more training for higher-order thinking, which meets the requirements of thinking capacity in core competencies. The arrangement of activities in the textbook conforms to the law of human cognitive development and pays attention to students’ self-evaluation. Based on this, combined with the characteristics of higher-order thinking, this paper puts forward three strategies to cultivate students’ higher-order thinking in textbook activities: maximizing “viewing” skill, optimizing project learning, making learning mode cooperative.