This qualitative case study describes in detail a college teacher’s experience in teaching critical literacy to English major students in Taiwan. A qualitative analysis of the data collected from classroom observation, class discussion and interviews shows that the teacher struck a balance between language skills teaching and critical literacy teaching. By posing critical questions and having a critical dialogue with students, the teacher helped students to read beyond the text on its literal level and raised their awareness of the subtle workings of ideologies in it. The teacher himself also underwent a change in his professional development, moving from banking pedagogy to empowering pedagogy. However, in taking a critical literacy approach to reading instruction, he encountered some difficulties such as a transmission model of literacy, students’ language learning beliefs, and teaching resources.
This paper reports a follow-up study that explored the relationship between EFL learners’ critical literacy practices and the English language proficiency. It investigated four focal EFL learners’ critical literacy practices in their dialogic interaction and also analyzed 39 students’ views on their critical literacy learning. The four focal students’ discussion on a gender-related local news article was analyzed based on the concept of critical discourse analysis; the students’ views on critical literacy learning were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings showed that despite the difference in their English proficiency, the four focal students all demonstrated critical literacy in varying degrees as shown in its previous study, and that critical consciousness of gender and class are raised through dialogic interaction. This study thus corroborates the previous one that English proficiency does not hinder EFL learner’s critical literacy practices. Besides, this study had an additional finding; that is, English proficiency levels do affect EFL learners’ views on critical literacy learning. Therefore, a critical literacy-based class would be more acceptable to students whose English proficiency is high.
This study examined EFL learners' critical development in a critical literacy-based reading class by analyzing their reflective essays on three articles: one article they read before critical instruction and two after the instruction. The analytical framework was mainly based on Fairclough's (1992a) Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse, focusing on the dialectical relationship between the students' discursive practices presented in their reflections and their ideological social practices. Findings show that the students' development of critical consciousness was seen after the critical instruction because in their response to the pre-instruction reading article, almost all of the students reproduced the conservative motherhood discourse, assuming the taken-for-granted responsibilities of a wife and mother, while in their response to after-instruction reading articles, around one third of the students displayed egalitarian discourses that challenge the taken-for-granted ideas about gender differences and admit of diverse ways of being in this world, and liberatory discourses such as the adoption discourse that liberates infertile couples from the domination of the fertility discourse. Therefore, from this study we suggest that critical pedagogy be implemented in EFL language instruction to develop students' critical consciousness and help them to be active critical readers.
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