The Compatibility Between The Reading Questions and Reading Objectives at High School Level in Türkiye

As communicative language use is of growing importance, countries worldwide focus on English language teaching through communicative and authentic approach. As a part of communication in language education and assessment, the reading skill plays a crucial role in the curriculum as well as the teaching and assessment practices in Türkiye. In 2023, the Ministry of Education introduced a shift in the assessment practices by publishing sample questions for testing reading skills, aligning them with the objectives derived from the existing curriculum. As this initiative is relatively recent, no studies in the literature have directly examined the alignment between these sample questions and the objectives. The present research aims to explore the cognitive levels of learning objectives embedded in the questions, examine how these levels progress from grades 9 to12 and analyze the alignment between the objectives and sample questions provided by the Ministry of Education, employing Bloom’s revised taxonomy as the analytical framework. The results show that there are different distributions of levels through the grades, and the number of compatible questions outnumber the number of incompatible ones a lot; however, some questions still fail to adequately assess higher-order cognitive skills.