Developing Students' Critical Literacy Skills

Critical literacy approach has become an important issue which is supported by high order thinking skill. It has replaced the skills-centered model of learning to read and write, and becomes increasingly important nowadays as students need to interact with more media of information and filter all the information so that they can select which information is useful for them and which one is not. As language becomes the means of conveying ideas and information, students who learn the language should be equipped with critical competence, enabling them to become critically literate. 

Critical literacy is “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations” (Anderson and Irvine, 1993: 82). 

Another definition is given by Luke and Dooley (2011): Critical literacy is the use of texts to analyse and transform relations of cultural, social and political power… to address social, economic and cultural injustice and inequality… it views texts – print and multimodal, paper-based and digital - and their codes and discourses as human technologies for representing and reshaping possible worlds. Texts are not taken as part of a canonical curriculum tradition or received wisdom that is beyond criticism (Luke & Dooley, 2011) The position of the students in critical literacy are the user of the language who digest the text and the information and question the message behind the text, as stated by McLaughlin & DeVoogd, (2004), critical literacy is different from traditional reading in which the author who has the power. 

In critical literacy the readers have the power to analyze and be critical toward the hidden meaning and message. However, students who learn the language not only need critical literacy but also basic literacy to be able to take a position clarifying the issues and point of views conveyed in a text.

Now, all this seems very complex to even think about let alone making a difference to the 25 students in front of you each year. Well, I wanted to make a difference in this area of learning as according to research a large majority of students are lacking the ability to engage with texts in a critical manner. So in order to engage the students in my class in critical literacy I decided to develop a learning culture that would enable students to develop their critical literacy skills. 

I am now going to work towards designing a plan that will help me build a learning culture that will support me in developing students' critical literacy skills.