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LANGUAGETEACHINGRESEARCH

A case study of an EFL teacher’s critical literacy teaching in a reading class in Taiwan

Mei-Yun KoNational Formosa University, Taiwan

AbstractThis 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.

KeywordsCritical literacy, EFL reading instruction, reading

I Introduction

For the past 30 years, the concept of literacy has moved beyond reading the words to ‘reading the world’ (Freire, 1970; Freire & Macedo, 1987), that is, from functional literacy that focuses solely on developing students’ linguistic skills to critical literacy that aims to give students a language of critique to achieve equality and social justice or effect social transformation (Edelsky, 1999; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Shor & Freire, 1985). This shift from functional literacy to critical literacy started to influ-ence educators in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)

Corresponding author:Mei-Yun Ko, Department of Applied Foreign Languages, National Formosa University, 64 Wenhua Rd, Huwei, Yunlin 632, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]

457537 LTR17110.1177/1362168812457537Language Teaching ResearchKo2013

Article

92 Language Teaching Research 17(1)

in the 1980s (Luke & Dooley, 2011) and has since then sparked some discussions and research studies on the application of critical literacy in this field, as in the special-topic issue Critical Approaches to TESOL by TESOL Quarterly in 1999, Norton and Toohey’s (2004) contributed volume Critical pedagogies and language learning, and Kubota and Lin’s collection Race, culture and identity in second language education (2009).

However, most of these studies were conducted in ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms (e.g. Benesch, 2001; Morgan, 2004; Wallace, 2003); only a few were conducted in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) settings (e.g. Kuo, 2009; Shin & Crookes, 2005b), and accounts of critical practices are scarce (Shin & Crookes, 2005a). A critical literacy approach to EFL teaching is still under-explored. Also, critical literacy instruction has been considered uncongenial to Asian students with Confucian-based educational/cultural backgrounds. For example, the cultural appropriateness of critical literacy pedagogy in EFL contexts in East Asian countries was questioned (e.g. Hu, 2002). Although there were a few empirical studies that argued for the possibility of implementing critical pedagogy in EFL context in East Asian countries (e.g. Kuo, 2009; Shin & Crookes, 2005b), they only focused on the part of the student in the instruction process, leaving the teacher’s perspectives and concerns unexplored. It is therefore sig-nificant to explore how a teacher responds to a critical literacy classroom in terms of his/her teaching beliefs, his/her concerns, and the challenges that s/he may encounter when doing the critical in the EFL classroom in Confucian-based pedagogical environments such as Taiwan. This empirical study attempts a holistic description of how a teacher teaches a critical literacy oriented reading class in Taiwan, and is guided by the following research questions:

1. How does a college teacher teach critical literacy in a university-level EFL reading classroom in Taiwan?

2. How does he or she conceptualize critical literacy and develop critical teaching?3. What difficulties or challenges does he or she encounter in taking a critical literacy

approach to EFL reading instruction?

II Literature review

1 Critical literacy

Due to different theoretical bases, the term ‘critical literacy’ has no single unified defini-tion (Green, 2001). However, it is generally contrasted with ‘functional literacy’, which views literacy as linguistic skills. Critical literacy views literacy as social practices (Gee, 1999). In Manning’s (1999) ‘Literacy-as’ Framework, he distinguished critical literacy from functional literacy by laying out their respective ideology purpose, literacy curricu-lum and instruction. The purpose behind functional literacy is to produce skilled workers for the marketplace. Therefore, the curriculum is prepackaged and restrictive, and the instruction is individualistic and competitive. However, for critical literacy, texts are inscribed with power and are not neutral but marked by vested interests and hidden agen-das. The curriculum is to use materials from the everyday world as text and analytic tools

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to deconstruct these texts to lay bare their ideological workings and power relations; therefore, the instruction is situated, interrogated and counter-hegemonic.

The term critical literacy is seen as critical reading for many reading educators. However, this kind of critical practice that cultivates the higher level skills and focuses itself on rational questioning procedures can be detached from the value-laden human world for its ‘pure’ reasoning. As Luke (2000) contended:

[S]uch approaches tend to sidestep a systematic analysis of the relation and fields of social, cultural, and economic power where people actually use texts … They are the logical outcome of definitions of literacy as individual skills within human subjects, rather than as situated social practices in communities. (p. 451)

Pennycook (2004) even calls this kind of critical practice ‘liberal ostrichism’, which ‘buries its head in the sand of objectivism (ostrichism) and fails to link its questioning to a broader social agenda’ (p. 329).

Cervetti, Pardales, and Damico (2001) made a comparison between critical reading and critical literacy based on their distinct philosophical traditions. Critical reading is in the liberal-humanist tradition, while critical literacy combines three strands of tra-ditions: post-structuralism, critical social theory and Freirean critical pedagogy. As such, critical reading and critical literacy have distinct epistemological and ontologi-cal assumptions and commitments. Epistemologically, knowledge in critical literacy is never neutral or natural, but is constructed based on the discursive rules of a par-ticular community, and therefore ideological. Ontologically, there is no ‘reality’ out there that is knowable and can serve as a referent for interpretation, but many situated, locally constructed realities.

To sum up, critical literacy is viewed as a process of questioning the status quo and of challenging existing knowledge and the social order (Gee, 1999). Critical literacy to the reading of the text involves ‘an understanding of how texts and discourses can be con-structed, deconstructed and reconstructed to represent, contest and, indeed, transform material, social and semiotic relations’ (Luke & Dooley, 2011, p. 856).

2 Critical literacy studies in EFL contexts

As mentioned earlier, there were only a few empirical studies on critical literacy prac-tices in the EFL context in East Asian countries. The following two studies (Kuo, 2009; Shin & Crookes, 2005b) explored critical practices in EFL contexts in Korea and Taiwan.

Shin and Crookes’ (2005b) study explores the possibility of critical pedagogy in two Korean EFL high school classrooms. They made a small-scale intervention in an extra-curricular English class in junior high school (12 students) and a regular English Culture class in senior high school (28 students). They introduced critically-oriented materials, providing opportunities for these learners to develop English language abilities when they were engaged in critical discussion of topics. Findings of this study suggested that these EFL learners, in spite of their limited English proficiency, were not resistant to this kind of materials and were active participants in generating critical dialogues in English. In addition, the study also called into question the stereotype of East Asian students as


passive and non-autonomous, dispelling the myth that East Asian classrooms are inherently rigidly hierarchical.

Kuo’s (2009) study examined an English Conversation class of 26 non-English major students in Taiwan. The students were given a shortened version of two pic-ture books to read and were then asked to create team dialogues based on them. He analysed the dialogues and students’ reflection papers based on Lewison, Leland, and Harste’s (2008) critical instructional model, a three-tier concentric model that moves from personal and cultural resources to critical social practices and to critical stances. The study found that social-issue picture books can effectively promote EFL students’ English learning and engage students, in critical practices. He then suggested that a critical literacy curriculum progress from personal/cultural resources to critical social practices and critical stances, but does not have to include all of them for critical instruction in EFL settings. Though Kuo’s (2009) study has explored to some extent critical learning of non-English major students in Taiwan, the study lacked a detailed description of critical literacy experiences of both the students and the teacher. To fill up this gap, the present study focused on exploring an EFL teacher who attempted a critical literacy approach to reading instruction.

3 Critical literacy teaching methods/strategies

Critical literacy is a way of thinking, that is a reading practice that challenges texts or the taken-for-granted ideas in our everyday life. There is no single method for reading from a critical stance (McLaughlin & DeVoogd, 2004a). Luke (2000) even cautioned against a formula for ‘doing’ critical literacy in the classroom (p. 453, cited in Behrman, 2006), though he still recognized some varied strategies to foster critical literacy. The varied strategies that encourage students to take a critical stance toward text include textual analysis, dialogue, and questioning or problem posing (Cervetti, 2004, p. 6).

For the teacher to take a critical literacy approach to an EFL reading class, McLaughlin and Allen (2002) suggested that the teacher should scaffold student learning by using a five-step instructional framework: explain, demonstrate, guide, practice, and reflect. First, the teacher can explain what it means to be critically aware and then demonstrate it by using a read-aloud and a think-aloud. During the process, the teacher provides a critical perspective from which students question and challenge the text. Questions that promote reading from a critical stance can include: ‘Whose viewpoint is expressed? What does the author want us to think? Whose voices are missing, silenced, or discounted? How might alternative perspec-tives be represented? What material or economic interests were served in its pro-duction? How are the participants named and shaped? What does it exclude? How is the reader positioned?’ (Burns & Hood, 1998; Luke, O’Brien, & Comber, 1994; McLaughlin & DeVoogd, 2004a).

Then, students can work in pairs or in small groups to offer responses as the teacher guides their reading and as they practice reading from a critical stance. Finally, the teacher and the students reflect on what they know about being critically aware and how it helped them to understand the text. Despite these suggestions and guidelines,

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critical literacy teaching is dynamic and continually needs to be revisited and refined (Coffey, 2008).

III Methodology

1 Settings and the teacher participant

The study was conducted in an English reading class at a university in Taiwan for one semester. The participant was the teacher of the reading course who held a PhD degree in English literature and had been teaching English for over 20 years at the time of the study. His English teaching experience started in a military academy, which had led him to take on an authoritative role in the classroom. Furthermore, without receiving any instruction in language education he taught in an authoritarian mode, mirroring what he had experienced in his school years. In other words, his way of teaching had been didactic lecturing in the past.

Though he did not acquire knowledge of critical literacy in a Western university, the idea of critical literacy was not totally unfamiliar to him because this education paral-leled the critical theories he had read in his postgraduate literary studies. He also agreed with me that English reading instruction should not be limited to the instruction of the four language skills, and that the English reading class should cultivate students to see through the hidden assumptions behind various texts. Therefore, he was interested in adopting a critical literacy approach to teaching EFL reading when I invited him to participate in this study.

2 Data sources

Data sources included classroom observation, audio-taped class discussion, course syllabus, two face-to-face interviews and several informal conversations with the teacher, and individual interviews with four students. A total of five hours of class discussion data that appeared significant and meaningful were selected and tran-scribed for analysis. The informal conversations continued regularly throughout the course, which provided valuable data to capture the teacher’s understanding of criti-cal literacy and critical literacy teaching, and the changes in his conceptualization of them. The two in-depth interviews with the teacher were respectively conducted prior to the course and after the course. The pre-course interview was about his earlier teaching experience in reading and teaching philosophies and the post-course inter-view was about his experience with critical literacy teaching. The interviews with students were conducted after the course. All the interviews lasted around one hour and were audio-taped.

IV Findings and interpretation

1 The instruction: Moving toward critical teaching

The teacher usually used four kinds of arrangements in teaching his lesson: group presen-tation of vocabulary/summary, teacher explanation of the text, and small group discussion


and sharing followed by teacher-led whole-class interaction. The first two arrangements were on literal reading, and the other two were on critical reading, which was the focus of this article as this study explored how the teacher did the critical in the class.

For critical reading, the teacher had students discuss first in small groups. He adopted a device similar to ‘literature circle’ (Daniels, 1994), where each group mem-ber in turn took the role of ‘director’ responsible for directing the discussion, ‘connec-tor’ for making text–self, text–text or text–world connections, ‘challenger’ for challenging the ideas students mentioned and ‘wrapper’ for summarizing their discus-sions. When students finished group discussions, several of them were called to share in front, and it was mostly during this period that the teacher posed critical questions and attempted a critical dialogue with students. To understand how the teacher moved toward a critical approach to reading instruction, I chose three teaching excerpts, respectively of the second, the fifth and the eighth week. Transcription symbols used in the excerpts are as follows:

T teacherSs more than one studentS1 the first identified studentS2 the second identified student= = = omitted section of discourse-- no response// pausexxx unintelligible words… continuous tone[ ] translated words from Chineseitalicized text spoken in ChineseNote: When the student’s name is identified, the first two letters of his or her pseudonym are used.

The first excerpt occurred in the second week that the teacher first introduced to stu-dents what critical literacy is and why. In this excerpt, he took as an example a well-known story from Buddhism, ‘Six blind men and an elephant’, to illustrate multiple perspectives to reading. He first started with a series of simple questions to review the story, for example ‘Have you ever heard about a story …’ (turns 1, 3), that required only simple answers, which the students gave (turns 2, 4), and he gradually complicated his questions with questions like ‘can you read any significance of this story?’ (turn 5). Though one student responded with a short answer, ‘fable’ (turn 6), the answer was still obscured and therefore required further explanation. As he said here, elephant in Chinese is the word 象 [elephant] but the same word 象 [elephant] also incidentally means ‘aspects of reality’ (turn 7). Thus, for Taiwanese students the elephant is a perfect meta-phor for reality. As a parable, the elephant here represents the whole of reality, in other words the whole phenomenal world. Just like in the story, the six blind people only touched different parts of the elephant, which meant they only perceived one aspect of the whole reality. By giving this parable, the teacher reminded students of the fact that no one can see the whole reality. People only tend to see reality from a certain angle among numerous other angles. Therefore reading is always perspective-taking (turn 8).

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Critical literacy involves being aware of how texts are constructed in ways that serve particular interests. The second excerpt presented below is an example of how the instructor attempted to problematize the text to raise students’ critical awareness. This excerpt occurred just after students completed their group presentation, which started with pictures they had retrieved from Time Magazine online of the McCaughey septuplets and the Chukwu octuplets. When they first showed a photo of the McCaughey septuplets, lots of students cried out admiringly because these kids looked very cute, especially with some milk stains on their mouths. Seeing this as one opportunity to invite students to interrogate the text, that is the photo, the instructor first pointed out that it was a commercial picture and then posed the critical question ‘What’s the purpose of this picture?’ (turn 1), a question that penetrates into the hid-den interests of a text. Because students were unable to answer it, he directed their attention to the captions ‘got milk’ (turn 3). In this way, the student, Dora, finally understood the purpose of the photo: ‘To sell milk’ (turn 4). By making the students aware of whose interests were involved in the picture, the instructor extended students’ critical understanding of the text, that is, to read between the lines.

Excerpt 1: Introducing critical literacy: Multiple perspectives

1 T: Have you ever heard about a story of the six blind people feeling a huge elephant? They try to understand what an elephant look like, right? This is a story from Buddhism, right? So can you tell me the reason why we have this fable? // ok, so six blind people, they do not know what elephants look like, right? They try to understand the size, the looks of elephants. And they will, the first blind person will feel the nose of the elephant and he says the elephant looks like a trunk, right? Uh, probably no, because the nose of the elephant is like a 水管 [pipe], right? Also how about the feet of the elephant?

2 S1: Trunk.3 T: The feet of the elephant is more like a trunk, a trunk of a tree, right? How about

the ear of the elephant?4 Ss: xxx (fan?)5 T: Yes. It’s like a fan, right? Can you read any significance of this story, can you

find any meaning from this story?6 S2: Fable7 T: A fable? What is elephant? Elephant is er, in Chinese, is 象 [elephant], right?

And 象 is also 萬象的象 [phenomena of the world]. So the elephant in this fable … the elephant is the reality.= = =

8 T: Just like in the story, the six blind people feel the elephant, so we can not see the reality. We only see reality from certain angle, so it is a perspective. So in reading, any kind of reading, it is a perspective.

(Lecture, ‘Critical Literacy’, second week)

Excerpt 2: Penetrating into the hidden interests of a text

1 T: You can see the group eight presented you a picture from the Internet of Time Magazine. This is … how many, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. They are drinking milk, right? With milk stains on their mouths. Ok, so you think it is.


Excerpt 3: Debating gender differences

1 T: Because of this physical difference, sometimes we would think that girls are poor in certain area. This is a prejudice, right? I think this is … I also think so because the author seems to try to tell us that this is a groundless sexism. Ok … let me ask Mark, ok? Mark, is there anything that you disagree with the author? Well, you can use Chinese if you feel comfortable using Chinese.

The third excerpt presented below records a situation when the teacher resumed a whole-class interaction after small group discussion on the article ‘Gray matter and sexes’. The authors of the article argued that it is cultural difference, rather than innate difference such as the size of the brain, that makes fewer women engineers or scientists. In this excerpt, the teacher first clarified with students the stance the authors took toward a common phenomenon that males outperform females in science (turn 1) and then called several students to express their opinions about the authors’ stance (turns 1, 3). In this way, he encouraged students to take a stance on the phenomenon. In this excerpt, Mark believed it was the education that made fewer female scientists (turn 2), and Wendy also supported the idea that it was environment that caused the difference (turn 6). To further challenge students to think about this topic, the teacher reframed his question as to whether the gender difference was due to nature or nurture (turn 7). Debbie believed it was nature that made her a woman (turns 10, 16). Seeing such an innate difference discourse can be disempowering to women, the teacher pointed out an excellent Taiwanese physicist who was female (turn 17) and also reminded students of the possible effects on women if they attributed the phenomenon to innate differences. Very often, females are acculturated to accept discourses that privilege males, often at the expense of females, and such an innate difference dis-course may deprive women of the opportunities to achieve their full potential. By raising the students’ awareness of the possibility that such a damaging discourse can stunt women’s opportunities, the instructor attempted to co-construct with students an empowering discourse that gender is socially and culturally constructed.

So you think they are cute, right? // So this is the kids, right, all happy … Actually, this is a commercial picture. What does that mean? What’s the purpose? // Dora, what do you think of … what’s the purpose of this picture?

2 Do: --3 T: Here we have the captions ‘got milk’ right? //4 Do: To sell milk.5 T: Right. They are making commercial for the milk powder, milk company, right?

It’s milk company, so they are being made of by the commercial, by the business world, right? I mean most companies have taken advantages of these kids, right? So they are using it as a what?

6 S1: making money7 T: Their business purpose or profit, right? What about the newspaper? You think

newspaper is doing justice to these kids? They are making headlines out of these kids, right? Headline. Why are they doing them?

(Text explanation, ‘Eight is too many’, fifth week)

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The teacher often used three steps to have a critical dialogue with students as found in the above excerpt:

1. Stance: asking students to respond to commonly held ideas or beliefs by taking dif-ferent perspectives;

2 Ma: I feel I agree a lot because this is a cultural difference, as the author mentioned, in Japan and Iceland, the possible reason is they are educated differently.

3 T: Yes. And also parents’ expectation 父母親的期望 [parents’ expectations], so it’s culture. So you agree, right? So, does anybody here think otherwise like I think yes the brain does make difference … anybody here would think brain makes difference? Does the brain have anything to do with the performance? What do you think? So how about Wendy, what do you think?

4 We: In my opinion, I think it is kind of ridiculous. I think intelligence performance of male and female are the same. What causes them different, the performance or their how do I say …

5 T: Well, say Chinese … It is kind of the case.6 We: What caused their different performance should be related to their interest

and living environment.7 T: This is what Mark said, right? It does not mean that you are born with your

brain that determines you are a boy or a girl. It is a cultural thing, right? = = = So we can also see this article in this frame work, nature vs. nurture.// ok. Debbie, which is important for you to become a woman? It is nature or nurture?

8 De: Can you say it again?9 T: My question is as you reflect upon yourself, do you think what makes you,

you are today? Like we say, you are a woman, right? Is it because of nature or because of nurture?

10 De: I think it is because of nature.11 T: Nature, right?12 De: Yeah.13 T: So you are born a woman?14 De: Yes.15 T: Ok.16 De: But I do not totally agree with what the authors say because there are

differences between female and male. For example, in some particular occupations or jobs, women can be better than male, and in some other cases, it would be opposite. And in reasoning skills, females are better than males, but in some area, they are worse. It’s kind of nature. = = =

17 T: Can you think about some exceptions like, we have a very good physicist which was female in Taiwan, what is her name? A female, an authority in physics. Yes, Wu Chien-Hsiung!

18 S1: The name sounds like a male.19 T: Yes. Like a male. She is the one, excellent in science. That is an exception.

But if you think yes, there is innate difference between sexes, your chances of reaching your full potential would be limited. Do you know what I mean? = = =

(Whole class discussion, ‘Gray matter and sexes’, eighth week)


2. Deconstruction: guiding students to uncover the effects of the commonplaces or stereotypes on people;

3. Reconstruction: encouraging students to reflect on the possibility of constructing the liberatory or emancipatory discourse.

In addition, to make students feel comfortable in expressing their views or ideas freely, the teacher sometimes encouraged them to use their first language, Chinese (turns 1, 5) though he instructed mostly in the target language, English.

As can be seen from the excerpts, question posing is one important strategy that the teacher used for his critical teaching. The questions he posed in the first few weeks con-tained mostly literal-comprehension questions that required only a literal response, but as the course moved half-way through the semester, he was able to pose more and more critical questions that encouraged students to question and challenge the values, beliefs and attitudes that lay beneath the surface of the text. Questions like ‘Whose voices are represented?’, ‘What are the intentions of the author?’ and ‘What other perspectives can we have on this issue?’ appeared intermittently in class discussion throughout the course.

To sum up, the teacher approached his reading instruction by encouraging them to see things from different perspectives (excerpt 1); asking students to consider the purpose of the text and the author’s motive (excerpt 2); supporting them in taking a stance on issues; examining the implications of world views, values, beliefs and attitudes; and articulat-ing, clarifying or even changing their own values (excerpt 3).

2 The teacher’s progressive change in his teaching beliefs

To the teacher, that teaching is learning was never truer than in his teaching of this course. He has experienced some change in his teaching philosophy. His concepts of teaching reading moved from teaching language forms to meaning construction and then to critical awareness. Obviously, his way of teaching has moved from transmission teaching to transactional teaching (Neilsen, 1989) or, in Freire’s term, from banking pedagogy to empowering pedagogy (Freire, 1970).

a From teaching language forms to meaning construction and critical awareness:. In the past, the teacher used to spend much time and effort in explaining vocabulary and grammatical structures when teaching reading because he believed ‘students would naturally understand the meaning of the text after they had understood the grammatical structures and vocabu-lary’ (first interview). Besides, it was the way his English teachers had taught when he was a student. They approached reading as word recognition and information processing.

This concept of form-based or grammar/vocabulary teaching had stayed with him for many years in his reading class. It was not until he had read some language-related books for this study that he began to change, moving from teaching language forms to meaning construction. He noted:

Teaching students reading or writing does not merely mean to teach them linguistic knowledge or cultivate in them linguistic competence. I came to think of reading and writing in English as

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making meaning out of the context in which words are used. I moved from teaching language forms to teaching the meaning embedded in language. (First interview)

He further realized that teaching that emphasizes the meaning-making activity in reading was still insufficient because language is not merely a tool for communication; more importantly, people use language to do things. One of the things people do in lan-guage is to influence others for their own benefit, and people achieve that purpose through taking different perspectives in representing things in language. With such awareness, he started to question his own teaching:

What meaning or whose intention was I helping my students construct out of the text? I found that more often than not I was helping my students reproduce the meaning or intention of the author of the text … The author may represent things in such a way that it benefits certain group of people at the expense of other groups of people. (First interview)

It is very true that authors always represent things in a certain way, and therefore, without teaching students to question the author’s position, students would read the text as the author intended it to be read. He stated:

Students were so submissive, following the line of thought the author had charted for them. But if we never call in question what the author has said, further questioning why he/she represents things in this way, not in any other way, we’ll always reproduce the author’s thought. What if the author’s thought is oppressive, or discriminatory, or unfair, benefiting certain groups of people while doing injustice to other groups of people. When students read such texts without further questioning them, they became accomplices in this oppressive language without knowing it. (Informal conversation)

Raising students’ critical consciousness along with their development in reading helped them see through how language works in the service of different beliefs or value systems and how different identities and representations are constructed in language, and thus made them become independent thinkers, not submissive followers who help maintain the status quo, which could be oppressive or discriminatory.

b Re-conceptualizing critical literacy:. Critical literacy was new to the teacher when I invited him to participate in the study. Therefore in the beginning of this course, I could see his idea of critical literacy was much influenced by his background in literature stud-ies, which views the rationality and the independent thinking of an individual as the fountainhead of critical literacy. But as he taught this course and explored the concept of critical literacy more, he gradually realized that focusing on student’s individual ability to think critically would miss the important part of critical literacy agenda that is more humanitarian than humanistic. He noted:

The more I teach this course, the more I find out that critical literacy is social and political. Critical literacy does not aim to train people to pass judgments on certain moral precepts or to do the hair-splitting analysis based on logic. Rather, it aims to raise people’s consciousness of their social situations, asking questions such as why do certain groups of people suffer from prejudices and lack of social resources while other groups of people enjoy privileges and


affluence, and what are the underlying discourses or ideologies that bolster such oppressive social structures. (Informal conversation)

This re-conceptualization that critical literacy is not so much aimed at training logical or high-level thinking as at raising critical awareness in students prompted him to encourage them to examine the oppressive systems or social structures that are created by certain groups of people for their own benefit, who tend to believe the ideas they hold to be ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. When students have understood that the ideas that had governed their way of seeing the world are not essential or intrinsic but socio-culturally constructed, ‘they can likewise construct a just discourse to impact the world and consequently bring about changes in society, thus creating a better society for people to live in’ (informal conversation).

In conclusion, the teacher’s conceptualization of reading instruction and critical literacy shaped his teaching of this course, which in turn made him grow and change.

3 The teacher’s concerns and challenges

Though the teacher himself gained a better understanding of reading and critical literacy through the teaching of this course, he had some concerns and also faced challenges while implementing ideas of critical literacy in an EFL reading class, including a ‘trans-mission’ model of literacy, language learning beliefs and reading materials for EFL learners.

a Transmission model of literacy (banking education):. A critical literacy classroom demands active participation and constant reflection on the student part which most Tai-wanese students were not accustomed to from their past learning experience. To engage students in critical literacy, the teacher used dialogues instead of the one-way lecturing, and it presented a challenge for him as he had been accustomed to lecturing in class, where students listened silently, and he also believed students had been used to listening to the teacher’s lectures. He said:

Students may have the idea that the more the teacher talks, the more they learn. If a teacher reduces his/her talk in the classroom, they seem to think that they are not learning enough from the teacher and the teacher is not doing his/her duty because they think it is the teacher’s duty to give them knowledge and the knowledge a teacher gives is through his/her mouth. (Informal conversation)

Therefore, it was difficult for him to transform himself from a teacher as informa-tion transmitter to a teacher as learning facilitator in the beginning. He found he had difficulty in eliciting responses from students during class. He said, ‘Students only waited for me to provide the answers to the questions’ (second interview). Though students became more responsive as the course went on, their participation still didn’t measure up to what he had expected from a critical literacy classroom that should be a forum for many different voices. ‘I wanted to make students feel the atmosphere of democracy in the classroom, but I somewhat failed in that respect’ (second interview).

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The phenomenon that students did not actively express their ideas or answer their teacher’s questions until they had been called on to do so might partly result from a ‘transmission’ model of literacy that they had been accustomed to and partly from a lack of English proficiency. In the ‘transmission’ model of literacy, students value the knowl-edge of their teacher more than their own, which is contrary to the spirit of critical liter-acy that encourages dialogues between students and the teacher. In critical literacy, the teacher ‘poses problems and engages students in dialogue and critical reflection’, and knowledge is ‘collaboratively constructed, involving the transformation of traditional teacher–student roles’ (Auerbach, 1995, p. 1, cited in Shin & Crookes, 2005b). Therefore, a Taiwanese teacher might experience frustration in the beginning, but this situation can be changed with the teacher’s patience, constant encouragement and skilled guidance. Students need time to get used to the new model of teaching that values their different voices. For example, in this class, the student, Mark, whose attitude toward the course was negative in the beginning but turned positive in the end, said:

I couldn’t accept this way of teaching in the beginning … the teachers [I had in the past] at most asked us some multiple-choice questions or easy-to-answer comprehension questions in the end. We never read like this. But I later got used to the teacher’s teaching and liked the group discussion or whole class discussion more and more because my classmates had great ideas and I learned a lot from them. (Interview with the student Mark)

Though the teacher experienced difficulty in initiating a dialogue with students and facilitating whole-class discussion, students liked the small group discussion and whole class sharing activity. Most of them believed these activities had expanded their thinking. One student, Debbie, said in the interview, ‘You can find others who have very different ideas from yours or some ideas you’ve never thought about. People from different back-grounds look at things differently’. In this study, the teacher adopted the form of a litera-ture circle to engage students in participation. In this way, he created a space for students not only to make links between their lives and texts to deepen their comprehension of text, but also to encourage discussions of multiple answers, perspectives and interpreta-tions for students to foster their critical literacy. Therefore, the small group discussion activity could compensate for EFL students’ non-expressiveness in whole-class teacher-led discussion.

b Students’ beliefs in language learning:. The second challenge came from students’ perceptions of learning a foreign language such as English. The teacher said:

They seemed to think that critical stance has little to do with the language itself. Many of the students think that all they need to learn is vocabulary and grammar, which constitute the building blocks of their English proficiency. (Second interview)

This concern was particularly true with the students who were struggling for basic linguistic competence:

I personally hope that we can learn a larger vocabulary during the reading course because vocabulary is the key point to help us to get information. I also suggest our teacher emphasize


the usage of the vocabulary to help us improve our writing ability as well. (Interview with the student Jenny)

Such language learning belief comes from students’ past experience in the English reading class in which vocabulary development, grammatical knowledge and reading skills were usually the focus of an English reading course. Concrete, tangible readings and discrete reading abilities were what most students had been accustomed to. However, a critical literacy-oriented instruction emphasized critical ways of reading which were intended to produce readers who can identify texts as crafted objects, to be alert to the values and interests espoused by the text, and recognize their position as compliant or resistant readers and perceive texts as motivated, rather than innocent (McDonald, 2004), which is different in nature from the English reading course that most EFL students had previously experienced.

To overcome this difficulty, the teacher has to make students understand the nature of language use in their daily lives. Language use in social contexts is not as neutral as they would think. The use of language in fact is political because some persons’ interests are at stake in these literacy practices. Only when they understand this will students adjust their beliefs in language learning and hence adopt a new belief in learning, which consequently makes them benefit from a critical literacy class.

In addition to convincing students of the fact that language use is political, the teacher can balance language skill teaching and critical literacy teaching as was the case in this class, which did not receive much resistance from students. As the teacher explained:

I know my students consider themselves as English learners. They come to the class with a mindset that they’re going to learn something from the class. That something can be knowledge of English such as vocabulary and grammar or reading skills like skimming and guessing the meaning through the context. I can’t ignore such learner needs, so part of my effort in teaching this course goes to helping my students understand the reading materials at the literal level, emphasizing words and grammar. (Informal conversation)

Even though students’ expectations for a reading course were to increase their knowl-edge of vocabulary and reading skills, they welcomed such a critical literacy-oriented reading class because they also felt the need to equip themselves with critical thinking ability. For example, Mark, a student who was still struggling for English proficiency and more conscious of the need to improve his proficiency in the English language, also emphasized the importance of critical literacy by quoting a saying from Confucius: ‘study without thinking is labor lost; thinking without study is perilous’. James, an advanced-level student, similarly viewed critical literacy as a very important tool. He commented: ‘Without critical awareness, you don’t judge. You have no idea of your own. You just follow others … Critical awareness is really important, not only in learning English but also Chinese, in logical thinking in daily life.’ He even highly valued this class:

The course has a positive effect on my way of reading in English. After the whole semester, I have some understanding about critical awareness. Now, I do not put the author’s view as the only perspective when reading a given article. (Interview with the student James)

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The other high-level student, Jennifer, had a high opinion of this course. She said:

In the past I did not know how to read critically and how to ask critical questions. This course helped me to do so. In this course, I determinedly tried to learn it. I feel I was really learning in this course. Every writer has his/her stance, so one needs to have the ability to judge. I found the author had their own stance and they wrote from their own position, particularly for TV commercials or newspaper advertisements. (Interview with the student Jennifer)

c Appropriate EFL reading/teaching materials:. The third challenge the teacher met with was concerning teaching materials. The teaching materials he used for this course were from one of a four-level ESL reading textbook series. Though the reading materials in this textbook were mostly authentic news stories from American newspa-pers and were appropriate for his students’ English proficiency level, they were con-sidered to be inappropriate for the critical literacy classroom because one of the most important tenets in critical literacy instruction is that texts students use in class should be connected to students’ lives and experiences (Shor, 1992). The teacher, after teach-ing this course, also admitted: ‘these reading materials still are not ideal materials because some of the issues discussed in those new stories are not culturally relevant to students’ lives here’ (second interview). Therefore, how to create teaching materi-als that are relevant to students’ lives and personal experiences is a problem a critical teacher needs to solve for a successful critical literacy-oriented reading class in the EFL setting.

V Conclusions

This study depicted an EFL teacher’s growth in critical literacy teaching in a Taiwanese college, and found the teacher’s pedagogy moving from a traditional didactic classroom to a critical dialogic approach or, in Freire’s term, from banking pedagogy to empower-ing pedagogy (Freire, 1970). Such a finding is significant, given that Taiwan has pro-gressed from an authoritarian state into a democracy in which many different ideologies are competing with one another. In such an open society, critical approaches to EFL learning are needed because they reflect the inseparable relationships between language learning and social change. This innovative notion is well expressed by Norton & Toohey (2004), who view the use of language as ‘a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future’ (p. 1).

The teacher’s growth explored in this study has yielded some insights for teaching and learning from a critical perspective and contributed to a greater understanding of critical literacy practices in East Asian classrooms. These countries under the influence of Confucian ideology are supposed to be incongruent to critical teaching (Kubota, 1999, cited in Shin & Crookes, 2005a). However, as the study showed, the teacher has to some extent transformed himself from an information-giver to a critical facilitator who, through dialogues with students, raised their critical consciousness about the text and unjust social practices, and the critical consciousness raised through critical pedagogy will empower them to be active agents for social change in the future.


Though such teaching is different in nature from that of the traditional English courses that students had previously experienced and from a school system where knowledge transmission is highly valued, the students in this study were not generally resistant to critical discussion. They especially welcomed the group discussion and the sharing activi-ties in which they felt their critical thinking was motivated and expanded. Though the teacher was awkward in engaging in dialogue with the students, and the students – long accustomed to transmission pedagogy – were also not very expressive of themselves in the beginning, they soon enjoyed critical literacy teaching and apparently benefited from it. This indicates that critical pedagogy can still be done in East Asian classrooms.

As the teacher plays a key role in the critical classroom, what is needed is a teacher training program me to cultivate a critical mind in the teacher and to develop those criti-cal teaching skills of the teacher that are culturally congruent. As found in this study, we can see that posing critical questions impromptu and having a critical dialogue presented a challenge to most of the EFL teachers, especially when students had long been accus-tomed to a ‘transmission’ style of instruction, and valued the opinions of the teacher more than their own. To overcome this difficulty, teachers must themselves be critical thinkers in order to help their students become critical readers. As McLaughlin and DeVoogd (2004b) stated, ‘When examining the teacher’s role, it is important to note that we cannot just become critical. It is a process that involves learning, understanding, and changing over time … So the teacher’s role in helping students to become critically aware actually begins with personal understanding of and engagement in critical literacy’ (p. 55). Only when the teacher is critically aware will teaching students to read from a critical stance be a natural process.

Finally, some pedagogical suggestions are provided for the teacher to implement criti-cal literacy in an EFL reading class: First, balance instruction in basic language skills and critical literacy. Though the teacher may perceive it to be important to immediately engage texts at the discursive level, a successful teacher does not neglect students’ practi-cal needs. Second, use locally-relevant or student-lived experience-related texts as sup-plementary materials. When using the ESL/EFL textbook is unavoidable, the teacher can supplement this with locally-published English newspaper articles related to topics that have been covered in class or that have immediate relevance to students’ lives. Third, create a supporting environment where learners can consider a variety of perspectives. Classroom activities such as small group discussion can not only create opportunities for students to voice their different perspectives, but also build rapport and establish a com-fortable learning environment. Fourth, model a questioning stance towards texts. The teacher’s guidance or modelling is vitally important when the students are not clearly picking up on it.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Note

This paper was revised from a part of the author’s dissertation Critical literacy development in a college-level English reading class in Taiwan, and underwent substantial revision based on two anonymous reviewers’ comments. The author owes a great gratitude to them.

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