Doing Critical English Language Teaching: Designing critical tasks to promote critical media literacy

Abstract

In the Brazilian educational scenario, textbooks often function as the main foundation of knowledge in additional language classrooms, reproducing and legitimating specific ideologies and representations of the world (GRAY, 2010). Critical approaches to language teaching, therefore, can be seen as an alternative that looks at students’ reality, problematizing it and offering a space for transforming it. This article, hence, has as its main objective to offer teachers who are interested in critical pedagogies for language teaching a sample of materials that attempt to promote critical language development (CROOKES, 2013) and critical media literacy (HOBBS, 2011) for students of English in Brazil. The tasks (ELLIS, 2003) here described are to be seen as sources that can be used to understand, in a more practical stance, how to promote critical language teaching.