Critical Literacy in an EFL Classroom in Vietnam : Agentive Empowerment, Ideological and Language Transformations

Abstract

The study, conducted in a mountainous province in Vietnam, explored how teaching methods of critical literacy (CL) were effective with high school students and their perceptions about these approaches. The study employed engaged ethnography (e.g., Phyak & Bui, 2014;Davis & Phyak, 2015) in which the researcher worked collectively with 27 students in understanding current pedagogical issues and applying CL in a real classroom. In particular, students were provided an opportunity to learn English through CL which was embedded in two vignettes on listening and project-based learning. The findings indicated CL pedagogies significantly improved students' English language competency and multiple skills such as leadership, presentation, and collaboration. Moreover, the students' responses strongly indicated CL is a meaningful, applicable, and critical approach for their English language improvement, socio-cultural awareness, and agentive development. The study offered some recommendations for applying CL pedagogies in language teaching, paying special attention to students' agencies while providing them with ample CL methods, and opportunities to enrich their academic English competency for effective language learning and ideological and academic transformations.

Critical Literacy as a Pedagogical Goal in English Language Teaching

“…Taking a step further forward in multimodality, many critical literacy practitioners and researchers have shared accounts of effective use of videos, such as documentaries (e.g., Alford & Jetnikoff, 2016;Alford & Kettle, 2017;Roy, 2017) and movies (e.g., Ajayi, 2012), and combinations of a wider range of content types, like videos, newspapers, pictures, and online resources (Bui, 2016) or essays, poems, and paintings (Michell, 2006) in their teaching of critical literacy. Depending on the nature of the classroom, this combination has taken other forms as well.…”

“…Teacher-researchers have also reported encouraging students to take on the role of researchers and proactively search for information about the topics of focus (e.g., Bui, 2016;Morgan, 2009). In a university writing course in Japan, Stillar (2013) tasked the students with writing three journal entries from the perspective of someone who belongs to a marginalized or…”

“…The Internet has also been promoted as a useful tool for critical literacy practice in different studies. Researchers like Bui (2016), Hobbs et al (2014), andStillar (2013) have briefly mentioned guiding their students to conduct Internet search for their classroom assignments. A more detailed account comes from Morgan (2009) who asked his EAP students to examine how the media treat a particular issue or current event in a major research essay assignment.…”

Roaming Students’ Role as Text Analysts: An Analysis of Indonesian Tertiary EFL Students’ Review Paper

“…In the Asian context, particularly in the EFL setting, an increasing number of studies have reported the implementation of CL (e.g. Abednia & Izadinia, 2013;Bui, 2016;Gustine, 2013;Huh, 2016;Kuo, 2014;Park, 2011;Setyaningsih, 2019). Regardless of the positive trend, the term CL is still a matter of contestation.…”

“…While the Four Resources Framework (FRF) emphasizes the four roles, earlier studies on the implementation of the framework commonly focuses on the text analyst role as a strong indication of positive results (Bui, 2016;Kuo, 2014). This can be explained by referring to the traditional practice of reading class that commonly weighed attainment of basic comprehension of text as a result of cognition while the more recent trend in the teaching of reading goes beyond basic understanding of texts.…”