From low to high order thinking skills in CLIL Science Primary textbooks: a challenge for teachers and publishers

Abstract

The present study analyzes CLIL Primary Science textbooks, in the context of the CLIL program that is being carried out in the Autonomous Community of Madrid. The point of departure is that science textbooks in Primary CLIL classrooms can be a good means to explicitly teach thinking and academic language skills to young learners, and specifically that the teaching of low order thinking skills (LOTS) may be expanded to the teaching of high order thinking skills (HOTS) from the first years of the teaching learning process, since the development of the latter “enable students to be independent learners (...) and might help to overcome socio-economic and cultural differences” (Chipman, Glaser & Segal, 1985: 5). The Unit of Plants was analyzed in depth in four textbooks of grade 2 Primary. The instruments of analysis were Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (BRT), and the language exponents used as indicators of implicitness or explicitness. The results show that the thinking skills most activated correspond to the lower cognitive categories in BRT, and that the majority of functions are explicit. However, some of the most important academic functions are implicitly presented. Provided that the most recent published textbook goes beyond the lower cognitive categories to the upper one and has more instances of high order thinking skills, it could be expected an improvement in these issues. The study suggests some possible ways of implementing HOTS; the need of explicitly teaching some academic functions; and the convenience of incorporating BRT framework in textbooks to “help teachers analyze their objectives, instruction, and assessments and determine the alignment of the three” (Anderson & Krathwohl 2001: xxiii).