Özet:

Promoting learners' higher-order thinking, which is also called critical thinking. requires using instructional strategies beyond merely recalling information but analyzing, evaluating, and creating information, as suggested in Bloom's Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (2001). As an indispensable vehicle for instructional practice and assessment, questioning is both an end to be achieved and a valuable means to attaining higher-order thinking levels. Bearing in mind that a teacher who can incorporate the so-called skills may transfer those to future language practitioners, teacher educators are on the lookout for designing courses that foster critical thinking. In this study, one of the core courses entitled 'Literature in ELT' was chosen to explore the questioning levels of pre-service ELT learners (henceforth PTEs) at a university to uncover their knowledge of higher-order thinking levels using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy as a framework. Randomly selected short stories which were classified according to Common European Framework of References (CEFR) levels were distributed to the learners. Afterwards, they were asked to generate questions imagining that they would assign these stories to their future learners to check their reading comprehension. The questions were gathered to determine what levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy the questions correspond to and examine the frequency and distribution of the questions at each level. The findings revealed that questions created by PTEs, addressing lower-level thinking skills in the taxonomy, outweighed the higher-order thinking skills for each level of stories.

Anahtar Kelimeler: