Thinking skills in the 12th Grade English coursebook in Timor Leste

This study aims to analyze the English coursebook of (Manual do Aluno INGLÊS 12.o ano de escolaridade/Students’ Manual English for 12th year of schooling). The internal parts of the coursebook was performed to determine whether the activities in the reading and listening sections of the 12th grade English coursebook stresses lower or higher levels of cognitive process. The study attempted to answer the following question: Do the cognitive levels of the activities that relate to the focus on reading and listening in the 12th grade English course book sufficiently represent all the six levels of the New Bloom Taxonomy of thinking skills? The objective of this analysis was to discover the activities of reading and listening sections that can sufficiently promote the levels of cognitive process. The activities that were determined as the criteria for analysis were: Wh-questions, true/false question, yes/no question, multiple choice question, complete the sentence phrase, a chart, matching questions, statement question, and a key word request question. The activities were gathered, listed and analyzed according to New Bloom’s Taxonomy, for lower levels of cognitive domain: remembering, understanding, and applying, and higher level of thinking skills: analyzing, evaluating, and creating. In addition, the researcher computed the frequencies and percentages that appeared in each level of cognitive process in each of the unit, distinguished the variety of the levels, and combined all the nine units. The findings indicated that the research tool were valid and reliable. The results showed that 98 activities emphasized mostly on lower levels cognitive order while only 63 activities emphasized the higher levels of thinking skills