A CROSS-NATIONAL ANALYSIS OF LEARNING OBJECTIVES USING BLOOM’S REVISED TAXONOMY: THE CASE OF IRANIAN AND KUWAITI HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS

Because of the crucial role of textbooks in foreign language programs, many countries, in accordance with their national curricula, develop their own local textbooks. Iran and Kuwait, as two authoritative governments in the Middle East, have recently altered their curricula to achieve a great scientific and economic position in the region. The present mixed methods study analyzed the manifested learning objectives in the recent Iranian and Kuwaiti nationwide high school ELT textbooks known as Vision and Over to You. To this end, Bloom's revised taxonomy of learning objectives was employed as an analytical framework to scrutinize the content structure and objectives of both series in order to investigate the extent to which they represent learning objectives for lower- order thinking skills (LOTS) and higher- order thinking skills (HOTS). Intra- and inter-coder reliability was carried out to ensure the consistency of the scheme. The results revealed statistically significant differences between the different volumes of each series in terms of learning objectives. However, the chi-square test showed no considerable difference in terms of emphasis on LOTS and HOTS. The overall results demonstrated LOTS as the most prevalent levels in both series. It also indicated that the selected material mostly failed to engage learners in the activities require HOTS. This study has some implications for policy makers, material developers and language teachers. Moreover, this study has opened new avenues for further cross-national research in the field of textbook assessment.

Keywords:

textbook evaluation , Bloom’s revised taxonomy , Iran and Kuwait , Vision series , Over to You series