A Descriptive Analytic Study Of The Algerian Third Year Middle

Résumé: This research attempts to evaluate the Algerian second generation middle school coursebook "My Book of English" which is designed for third year level. It is a micro-evaluation that seeks to check the extent to which the textbook tasks develop the cognitive levels and to shed light on third year middle school teachers' perspectives towards the use of "My Book of English" in relation to Bloom's taxonomy for educational objectives. In order to conduct this research, a mixed method approach was followed and a proposed checklist was adapted. Besides, a developed questionnaire was submitted to third year middle school teachers who are using the textbook as a language teaching material. The results of both the checklist and the questionnaire revealed that textbook tasks cover the cognitive levels in an unbalanced way. Also, the findings show that Knowledge is the most frequent and the predominant level having 50% of the total number of the tasks, followed by Evaluation with 39% and Comprehension with 31%. On the other hand, Application, Analysis, and Synthesis are less frequent with 9%, 1%, and 3% for each level respectively. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that third year middle school teachers are familiar with the notion of Bloom's taxonomy, most of them failed to assess the coursebook and to determine the cognitive levels of each type of tasks. Accordingly, the study concluded with a number of recommendations which in general seek for designing a new version of the textbook that may help the learners develop their higher-order thinking skills.

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