An official textbook and non-official EFL curriculum in Chile: a comparative analysis of learning tasks' levels of cognitive demands for second graders

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study is to compare and determine the degree of coherence between the non-official national second grade EFL program published by the Ministry of Education and the respective EFL textbook (Bounce 2) used by students at state schools in Chile. Through the application of Bloom‟s revised Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) and the General Model of Hierarchical Complexity (Commons, Trudeau, Stein, Richards, & Krause, 1998; Commons, 2007), learning task instructions were analyzed and tasks were classified in terms of their levels of complexity. A mixed methodological design has been adopted to provide an exploratory account of patterns observed. The classification of tasks made in the EFL textbook and the EFL program for second graders revealed a mismatch between their tasks‟ levels of cognitive complexity. In addition, the interpretation of results also places both documents at an early childhood level of hierarchical complexity, which does not correspond to second grade learners‟ developmental stage.