Teaching Creative Thinking Skills In The Algerian Secondary Schools: An Analysis Of The Textbook New Prospects

Résumé: The present study is concerned with the issue of teaching creative thinking skill in English as a Foreign Language. More precisely, it is about investigating the teaching of creativity in the Algerian secondary school. It aims at evaluating the textbook New Prospects which is designed for the third year learners at secondary school. This investigation is conducted in the light of Anderson and Krathwohl’s Revision of the Bloom’s Taxonomy (2001) of thinking skills. The data collected involve a sample of three hundred and twenty five tasks extracted from the New Prospects. These tasks include a total of nine hundred and three Action Verbs which are analyzed by adopting a Mixed Research Method. It uses both the quantitative and the qualitative methods. In particular, the study implements a descriptive statistical method in order to gather statistical data, and it uses the Taxonomy Table and Content Analysis for the interpretation and explanation of the results. The findings reached from this investigation show that the Higher Order Thinking Skills (Productive Skills), including Evaluate, Analyze, and Create, are less developed in the textbook in comparison to the Lower Order Thinking Skills (Reproductive skills), which consists of Remember, Understand and Apply. By considering the productive aspect in this process of categorization, the study has shown that creative thinking skill is reflected in higher percentage more than evaluate and analyze skills. As a conclusion, we notice that creativity is developed in the New Prospects only to some extent (16%) of the total number of tasks and reproduction is reflected more than production, mainly the skill of Understanding which presents 27%. For further studies, we may suggest other perspectives in which other researchers can tackle the issue of creativity. For instance, they can change the case study by adopting distinct textbooks designed for the learners at the Algerian schools. Then, they can also investigate teachers’ attempts to teach creativity, or students’ creative learning in the Algerian context.

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