Textbook Evaluation Based on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy: Iranian Senior High School Textbook in Focus

This study aimed at evaluating listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities of Iranian senior high school English textbook, Vision 2, based on Bloom’s revised version of cognitive domain. The study was actually conducted to determine the levels of cognition in Bloom’s revised framework concerning the four language skills activities in this textbook. Furthermore, it aimed to investigate the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards such activities through researcher-made questioners. For the first purpose, the activities in the textbook and the workbook were located, tabulated and codified on the basis of the codifications in Bloom’s revised version. Then, the frequencies and percentages of the codes were calculated. For the second purpose, 130 users of the textbook, 30 teachers and 100 male and female high school students were selected through convenient sampling and questionnaires were distributed among them. They were asked to respond to questionnaires anonymously during the class sessions. The collected data from questionnaires were analyzed manually. The obtained results demonstrated that the identified codes were mainly classified under the lower-level categories in Bloom’s taxonomy, indicating that the activities were not beneficial for the students actively involved in the higher levels of thinking process. Moreover, the result of the Chi-square test showed that the relationship between two groups of low-level and high-level codes was not statistically significant and the obtained codes did not show a regular pattern. As for the responses to questionnaires, the activities, particularly listening and speaking activities, failed to be much responsible for the students’ deep learning.