A Discourse Analysis of Students’ Reflections in a Critical Literacy Picturebook Read-Aloud Class

Abstract

This study is based on a read-aloud class picture book focusing on achieving critical awareness. It was conducted over the course of one month at an elementary school in Korea and analyzed how sixth-grade students responded to texts which raised questions about multiple perspectives, gender roles, and the status of marginalized minorities. The research was conducted on twenty sixth-graders in an elementary school in Gyeonggi-do. The read-aloud class was organized based on Four Resources Model of Reading and consisted of two sessions. During the first two-week session, students read a text on the basis of code-breaking and meaning-making practices, and during the second session that was conducted in the last two weeks, they read the texts through the prism of text-using and text-analyzing practices. In order to investigate whether critical literacy instruction developed critical awareness in the students, the students’ discourses in their written reflections on the texts were analyzed using Fariclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse Analysis. The results indicated that the read-aloud critical literacy class enhanced students’ engagement with the texts by enabling them to question the issues that were in play. In addition, six out of the twenty students demonstrated their critical awareness in their reflections. They produced critical literacy-oriented discourses including perspective-challenging discourses that questioned the authors’ points of view, individual-difference discourses, and positive-discrimination discourses, rather than conventional, conservative discourses. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that it would serve elementory school instructors well to employ critical literacy practices in their reading classes. However, further research is required in order to gain more information regarding the applicability of critical literacy instruction in the EFL context. The results of the study and their pedagogical implications will be discussed in detail in this paper.