Instructional Model of Critical Literacy in an EFL Context: Balancing Conventional and Critical Literacy

Abstract

This article explores the general patterns of interactions between the teacher and students during the different instructional steps when the teacher attempted to incorporate both conventional skill-based reading and critical literacy in an English as a foreign language (EFL) literacy class in a Korean university. There has been a paucity of EFL research that addresses balancing skill-based functional and critical literacy empirically in school settings. This practitioner qualitative action study was conducted with 29 Korean university students who had not experienced critical literacy practices before, but only worked exclusively on basic reading skills of comprehension. The classroom interaction patterns were investigated with qualitative research methods. The findings included teacher-students interactions for the purposes of decoding and comprehension, of personalizing and socializing with the reading texts, and for critical analysis of underlying assumptions and dominant ideological beliefs. The interactions between teacher and students required unique instructional steps of explicit teacher guidance for successful integration between skill-based and critical literacy practices. While there were moments where the teacher could not address critical literacy to teach skill-based literacy, students started to initiate critical literacy practices as they learned to be critical analysts of ideological constructions of the texts toward the end of the semester. Educational implications have been discussed.