A Comparative Evaluation of Reading Comprehension Questions in English Textbooks:Student Books Versus Workbooks

The current study aimed to evaluate the post-reading comprehension questions and task types in“English for Schools” series including three student books and their accompanying workbooks inlight of Freeman’s taxonomy. To this end, the reading comprehension questions following ۱۰reading passages in the student books and ۱۰ ones in the workbooks were scrutinized andclassified. The results revealed that Content questions were the most dominant type in all thestudent books and workbooks except for Vision ۳ in which Language questions were the mostfrequent of all. The results also showed that the highest frequency belonged to Explicit and Formin student books and Explicit and Implicit, Form, and Personal Response in workbooks. The resultsof the Kruskal Wallis test of independent samples indicated a significant difference in terms ofAffect type across the student books and workbooks. The findings raise the material developers’awareness of the existing post-reading comprehension questions to supplement the books with themissing types and take a comprehensive approach to developing the learners’ reading skills.

Keywords:

Affect questions , Content questions , Language questions , Reading comprehensionquestions