Task in a textbook plays a crucial role in the learning process. The sufficient task helps students to practice their skills. This study analyzes the cognitive levels of reading comprehension questions within English textbook entitled Pathway to English for grade tenth. There are two aims of this study, namely: (1) to find out the cognitive level of each question in reading tasks and (2) to find out the form of higher-order thinking questions in reading tasks.
This descriptive qualitative research adapted the cognitive domain in Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy as the instrument. The data used in this study were collected from the textbook contents in form of reading comprehension questions. The document analysis was applied as a method to construct the codes and themes to reflect the result of the study. Subsequently, the percentage and the frequencies of the cognitive level of questions were calculated and tabulated.
Afterwards, the results showed that the reading tasks do not fully cover all cognitive levels, missing creating levels. It was also revealed that there are four forms of higher-order thinking questions. As a result, this study recommends that the textbooks authors need to advance the questions with higher-order thinking skill to develop students’ critical thinking, and teachers have to improve their knowledge about higher order thinking skill. This study may give an insight of textbook selection for English teachers and may be used as a consideration for future researchers who are interested in the same topic.

Keywords: reading task, bloom’s taxonomy, higher order thinking skill