Evaluation of Cognitive and Argumentation Skills in Secondary English Textbooks

The present study aims to find out how far the secondary level textbooks of English are helpful to develop the young learners' cognitive and argumentative skills by evaluating the exercise questions of the English textbooks for classes 8th, 9th and 10th, published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The theoretical frameworks adopted for the work are the revised version of Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive demand by Anderson and Krathwohl, and Wolfe's Argumentation Model for argumentation skills. After analysing 326 exercise questions, the researchers found that the cognitive demand of 'Analysis' that requires analytic argumentation skill is the most frequent, followed by 'Understand' requiring text-centred arguments. However, the cognitive demands of 'Create' and 'Apply' have only marginal representation, which implies that the learners' creative and problem-solving cognitive skills are ignored in these textbooks. This study can be helpful to textbook developers and curriculum planners for enhancing the quality of textbooks.