A Descriptive Content Analysis of the Extent of Bloom's Taxonomy in the Reading Comprehension Questions of the Course Book Q: Skills for Success 4 Reading and Writing

Cognition is the scientific concept meaning the mental processes contained in obtaining knowledge and understanding, covering thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem solving, while meta-cognition is the knowledge and comprehension of our own mental actions and capabilities and those of others, as well as organization of these actions (Special Education Support Service, 2009). The taxonomy concept is mainly employed in the realm of biology when it comes to the categorization of beings; however it is used in many other areas as a means of separating terms into groups and hierarchies of opinions. In 1948, Benjamin Bloom coordinated and directed a number of educators who, over a course of eight years, categorized educational objectives that were finally called Bloom's Taxonomy. Reorganized in 2003, Bloom's Taxonomy is grouped into three areas of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The cognitive domain is grouped under six subsequent levels of thinking. The initial three levels or lower order skills contain: remembering, understanding, and applying, while the last three levels or higher-order skills cover: analyzing, evaluating, and creating (Orey, 2010). In other words, the first three down levels are knowledge, comprehension and application, while the three up levels are analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Taxonomy is hierarchical; each step is located at the upper steps as well, which means high levels cover the levels at down. To give an example, a student being in the application level is able to function in both knowledge and comprehension levels as well. Eliciting meaning from reading passage necessitates a group of skills that go far beyond the ability to decipher or word perception (Konza, 2011). With all these in mind, this study aims at identifying to what extent the reading sections of EFL course book "Q: Skills for Success 4 Reading and Writing" by Oxford Publishing refers to the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. To achieve this, each reading section was analysed carefully in order to have a broad view on which steps of taxonomy, either upper or down, were employed in the reading sections of the mentioned course book. Question stems focusing on each level and key words exemplifying the steps of the taxonomy were used to come to a conclusion on which levels of thinking order were available in the overall analysed reading sections. Furthermore, this study will bring a light on the scope of reading questions having the characteristics of lower and higher level thinking orders involved, and as a result the study will be a guide for the EFL course books being written or will be written in terms of covering Bloom's Taxonomy. Many EFL course books have been written through diverse learning theories with different principals regarding the mental processes. However, few EFL course books consider such mental processes, particularly the EFL course books employed in local scope and written by nonnative authors. Besides, one of these mental processes, the Bloom's Taxonomy, is not involved extensively in the formation of both local and global scope EFL course books, in our case this study refers to this gap by hinting on this course book which serves solely for the lower levels thinking orders. It will supply the informational needs of stakeholders serving both in local and global extent. To sum up, this research addresses a significant problem which is the lack of cognitive processes in the reading sections of the written EFL course books in both local and global scopes. Literature Review Efficient readers comprehend the aim of their reading, and so are able to form their reading style consequently. They know the reason of reading as well as how they ought to read to reach their aim. When they are in need of a particular telephone number, they know employing alphabetic and scanning skills to find out the name and number soon; if they want to know if a book fits to their requirements, they can skim content parts, chapter titles and a paragraph to make their selection; if they require to upload new software or make a complex recipe, they can pursue guidance thoroughly and gradually; if they need to synthesise data from a number of supplies, they can read analytically, elicit basic data and decipher what it conveys on the ground of their owned knowledge. …