Evaluation of reading comprehension questions in ELT Moroccan textbooks

Abstract

It has been well-documented that traditional teaching that emphasizes rote memorization is unable to meet the 21st-century challenges.  Learners of today need to learn how to think for themselves and voice out their opinions. This can be achieved only by providing learners with teaching materials that promote skills of analysis, syntheses, and evaluation. The objective of this paper is to evaluate reading comprehension questions of Moroccan ELT textbooks, entitled Ticket to English 2 and Gateway to English 2. This paper seeks to examine the extent to which higher-order questions that stimulate thinking are infused in reading comprehension texts. The study adopted the descriptive quantitative method using a checklist. The checklist is used as an instrument to collect the data using Bloom's taxonomy to investigate the frequency of questions.  The results obtained show that 77% of the questions in the first textbook and 84.12% of the questions in the second textbook are classified as being low-order questions. The questions that emphasize high cognitive skills are 23% and 14.78 respectively. Hence, it has been deduced that the two textbooks failed to promote skills of higher-order thinking skills through reading comprehension questions.