Abstract
This study documents how a high school ESL teacher working with new immigrants ages 14–20 supported the development of their critical thinking and English language skills by using advertising analysis activities. The article examines the use of key critical questions for analyzing media messages and documents instructional activities designed to strengthen students' vocabulary, reading, and discussion skills to build inferential thinking and critical analysis skills. The researchers focus on four instructional practices used by the participating teacher, which rely on strategies for applying critical questions to analyze advertising: the cloze technique, the question generation approach, practice in analyzing ads using critical questions in class discussion, and a collaborative online writing activity resulting in the creation of a multiparagraph multimedia document. These activities provided a meaningful opportunity for students to practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in English while supporting the development of abstract thinking, balancing the learning of new academic language and cultural knowledge, and connecting with students' prior knowledge, home cultures, and everyday experience.
Highlights
Learning a language is a dynamic social activity: through interacting with others about the symbolic environment in both classrooms and informal spaces, learners gain knowledge through observation, practice and experience
This paper examines the use of key critical questions for analyzing media messages and documents a variety of instructional activities designed to strengthen students’ vocabulary, reading, and discussion skills to build inferential thinking, and critical analysis skills
We focus on four instructional practices used by the participating teacher, which all rely on strategies for applying critical questions to analyze advertising: (1) the cloze technique; (2) the question generation (“Jeopardy!”) approach, (3) practice in analyzing ads using critical questions in class discussion, and (4) a collaborative online writing activity resulting in the creation of a multi-paragraph multimedia document
Summary
This case study profiles the teaching strategies one teacher used to support the articulation of critical thinking about visual ads for media literacy development and English acquisition. Students used new adjectives of emotions to describe their interpretations of onscreen characters’ feelings, and they described and acted out and pointed to details of the film’s construction to answer the question “What in the film made you think or feel that?” the participating teacher used the cloze technique for a unit about public murals, where assignments in their art class required students to create panels of a mural to represent the Newcomer Learning Academy at the school Such reading/listening/writing/viewing assignments featured written interpretations in plain language of local murals and the stories behind them. Through collaboration with the art teacher, the students designed and created their own panels for a mosaic mural representing their newcomer program, which they proposed in writing (using concepts of message, purpose, audience and representation), and presented to mainstream art students upon completion
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