There is substantial literature, particularly from the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and the United States, about effective critical literacy practice with culturally and linguistically diverse school-age learners (Alford, 2001b; Alford & Jetnikoff, 2011; Collins, 2005; Hammond & Macken-Horarik, 1999; Janks, 1991, 1999, 2000, 2010; Lau, 2013; Locke & Cleary, 2011; A. Luke, 1995b; A. Luke & Walton, 1991; McLaughlin & DeVoogd, 2004a, 2004b; Sandretto, 2011). Adult EAL/D learners in tertiary or optional language courses are also the subjects of many research reports (see Benesch, 2009; Burns & Hood, 1998; van Duzer, Florez & National Clearinghouse on ESL Literacy Education, 1999; Wajnryb, 2000; Wallace, 1995, 2003, 2008). Much of the available literature relevant to this review (e.g., Comber, 2001; Duff, 2001; Hammond & Macken-Horarik, 1999; Monareng, 2008; Rogers, 2007; Wallace, 1992, 1995, 2008) argues that for critical literacy to occur in either L1 (English as a first language) or L2 (English as a second or subsequent language) classrooms, certain roles, knowledge constructs, attitudes and practices need to be established for a critical stance on language to be possible. What constitutes these elements varies from context to context, indicating the diversity of interpretation of critical literacy.
A central theme in the literature is the need to investigate grammar and specific language choices at the word, clause and sentence level in relation to the whole text and context. This allows teachers and students to make the connections between the way authors word texts and the ways they simultaneously word up the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Practical frameworks for critical literacy using grammar as a starting point are provided by a range of authors including Janks (1991, 2010, 2013), Wallace (1992, 1995, 2003), W. Morgan (1997), and Morgan and Ramanathan (2005). Janks’ early work (1991) takes a close linguistic focus and suggests investigating modality (degrees of certainty encoded in modal auxiliaries), passive voice (where subject is removed rendering the action agentless), articles (use of the,
a, and an), and the sequencing of information in a text. These, she argues, are textual
clues to the ideological workings of texts and wield significant power in constructing meaning.
Likewise, Wallace (1992, 1995, 2008) focuses on grammar and how teachers can utilise Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to aid the critical enterprise. Drawing on research on her own classroom teaching with adult English as a Foreign Language learners, she explicates the process of developing a grammar metalanguage (SFL which views language as a system of choice), and following this logically through to a critical enquiry into the choices writers and speakers make in order to construct meaning in certain ways. Knowledge about language (KAL), or knowledge about how language is used as a resource to shape and organise meanings (Derewianka, 1990, 2012) is an important aspect of both EAL/D teaching and critical literacy work. Gaining knowledge about language, according to Christie (2004), is a significant aspect of learning to “operate in independently critical ways in using ... literacy” (p. 189). Wallace (1999) presents a seamless account of how to do critical literacy by first providing her adult students with knowledge about the linguistic resources (grammar and genre knowledge) they need to analyse texts critically. While this might be achievable in the adult learner context, Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999) and Kalbach and Forester (2006) stress that the high school classroom with learners who have different resources at their disposal, by virtue of their age, a less- even playing field, and a crowded curriculum, is a different matter. Derewianka (2012) points to another possible reason for why English teachers in Australia might have difficulty with a KAL approach. She notes that, surprisingly, “explicit knowledge
about language has often been absent from (mainstream) English curricula” historically in Australia (p. 127). EAL/D teaching, on the other hand, has had a long tradition of teaching KAL. In fact, Miller and Windle (2010) call for “[the enrichment of] existing pedagogical literacy models [including critical literacy] with second language perspectives in order to better support a particular cohort of students” (p. 38). Hammond (2008, 2012), Gibbons (2008) and Harper and de Jong (2009) express a similar view.
One influential interpretation of critical literacy and its attendant pedagogy is set out by Hilary Janks. Janks’ (2000, 2010) approach to critical literacy consists of four main realisations of critical literacy – Domination, Access, Diversity, and
Design – and that each of these manifestations is based on different conceptions of
the relationship between language and power.
A Domination approach sees language and discourse as a means of preserving and reproducing relations of control. The pedagogy associated with this approach is called Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and originated with the work of Romy Clark and Norman Fairclough. CLA emphasises the fact that texts are constructed. It assumes that
anything that has been constructed can be de-constructed. This unmaking or unpicking of the text increases our awareness of the choices that the writer or speaker has made. Every choice foregrounds what was selected and hides, silences or backgrounds what was not selected. Awareness of this prepares the reader to ask critical questions: why did the writer or speaker make these choices? Whose interests do they serve? Who is empowered or disempowered by the language used? (Janks, 1993, p. iii)
This approach focuses on critical “reading” and deconstruction across a range of modalities. In 1997, W. Morgan (1997) observed that critical literacy in senior English, as practised in Australia at the time, was concerned largely with a deconstruction, or domination, approach; with identifying “the cultural and ideological assumptions that underwrite texts … the politics of representation…. the inequitable, cultural positioning of speakers and readers within discourses” (pp. 1-2). More recently, Misson and Morgan (2006) argue that it is, ideally, also about reconstruction and transformation – talking back to texts.
Access is concerned with making more explicit the language of power and the
dominant forms it takes, while simultaneously valuing the language and literacy diversity of student groups. The principal pedagogic manifestation of Access in Australia can be seen in Genre Pedagogy (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, 2000; Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987) where the dominant forms of language are carefully expounded to students where formerly teachers thought students would somehow already know them or learn them by osmosis. This has been a hallmark of EAL/D teaching in Australia since the 1980s and is an important part of teachers’ pedagogy. Janks (2010), Lee (1997) and A. Luke (1995b) caution, however, that access without deconstruction can serve to naturalise and reify such genres without questioning how they came to be powerful.
Diversity, as an approach to critical literacy, proposes that being inclusive of a
diverse range of languages and everyday literacies students bring is “a central resource for changing consciousness” (Janks, 2000, p. 177). In this approach, students’ home cultures, languages and everyday literacy practices are considered to be as significant in the process of schooling as the curriculum itself (Brice Heath, 1982; Alvermann, Phelps & Gillis, 2009). Diversity is seen as a way to help students be more comfortable with difference and change so that these are considered normal, productive resources for innovation.
The Design approach “encompasses the idea of productive power—the ability to harness the multiplicity of semiotic systems across diverse cultural locations to challenge and change existing Discourses” (Janks, 2000, p. 177). Human creativity and students’ ability to create manifold new meanings lie at the core of this approach. This approach emphasises the production of multimodal (print, visual/virtual, semiotic) texts and their reconstruction (or design) using a range of media. The work of the New London Group was influential in pioneering this approach. Design, an element considered fundamental in a Multiliteracies approach to education (Anstey & Bull, 2006; Kalantzis & Cope, 2008, 2012; Kress et al., 2005; Mills, 2006, 2010). While Diversity provides the “alternative perspectives for reconstruction and transformation” (Janks, 2010, p. 123), Design provides the possibility for diversity to be realised. Kostogriz (2002) furthers this argument by suggesting teachers should harness the potentially innovative “diverse semiotic resources and funds of knowledge” (p. 237) that EAL/D students bring to their learning.
Janks (2000) suggests that the four approaches cannot be separated but are crucially interdependent and need to be woven together to formulate critical literacy pedagogy that achieves its shared goal: equity and social justice. For example, “Access without a theory of domination leads to the naturalisation of powerful discourses without an understanding of how these powerful forms came to be powerful” (p. 178). Janks’ model is important due to its detailed conceptualisation and its traction in contemporary critical literacy research. A number of studies, some of which are not yet complete and some of which I report on later in this chapter, are drawing on this model to guide analysis of data. I utilise Janks’ 2010 model as the explanatory framework in my data analysis in Chapter 6.
In attempts to invigorate English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses in the United States, Benesch (2009), B. Morgan (2009a, 2009b), and B. Morgan and Ramanathan (2005) provide another dimension to critical literacy. They suggest critical literacy can complement, not replace, the conventional focus on the skill sets needed for academic study. They argue that through “denaturalising and demystifying disciplinary content, [students] become aware of the partiality – hence contestability – of the dominant knowledge claims in their chosen fields of study” (B. Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005, p. 156). The tool kit they offer is comprised of: (a) the use of narratives/autobiographies to link personal experience to broader exercise of power in institutions; (b) the juxtaposition of texts in order to question and challenge received knowledge; (c) raising awareness of the historical and political trends (e.g., colonialism) that have led to the spread of English and its dominance in the world; and (d) use of technology and multimodal strategies to help reposition knowledge and learners.
This view that critical literacy can revitalise rather than usurp traditional approaches to language teaching can be seen as an attempt to salvage it from pedagogical obscurity as we enter an era of high accountability in education (Clarence & Brennan, 2010; Comber & Nixon, 2009). It is significant in terms of this study as high school learners of EAL/D are also learning English for academic purposes and they are frequently exposed to more traditional approaches to language teaching, as outlined in Chapter 1.
Issues surrounding the implementation of critical literacy in high school classes in Australia were first pointed out by Hammond and Macken-Horarik in 1999. They
raise a number of significant points, to which I alluded in Chapter 1, which continue to vex teachers of EAL/D learners. These questions include: to what extent does critical literacy require control of mainstream literacy practices (e.g., genres and grammar metalanguage)? What resources are actually necessary to engage critically with texts? How do schools recognise the time and effort needed to implement such an approach explicitly? In a case study of a junior high school science classroom, Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999) identified a workable approach to critical literacy with EAL/D learners. The teacher “shunted” overtly between making scientific knowledge explicit (i.e., the cultural resources necessary to comprehend the topic of human reproduction); developing linguistic resources that enabled the students to talk and write about the topic; and a critical orientation to the scientific topic in question and its moral and ethical implications. In this way, the teacher straddled the three domains of teaching EAL/D considered necessary for mainstream success – discipline knowledge as it is valued by the field; language features that act as a vehicle for the field; and critical inquiry into the field and its language use. However, junior high school curriculum and pedagogy has greater porosity than senior schooling (Jewitt, 2008). Therefore, my study contributes to the documentation of workable approaches to critical literacy in senior high school within certain conditions.
In this same vein, Locke and Cleary (2011) conducted a two-year project in New Zealand high schools on teaching literature in final year (Year 13) mainstream multicultural classrooms. Four key findings were: (a) that close critical reading of texts was multidimensional and involved teachers drawing on a range of approaches to literary and textual study including personal growth models; (b) that the cultural background of the students influenced the approaches they adopted. The teachers used both reader response2 and critical approaches to “open up an avenue to the
cultural orientation of the reader as a determinant of meaning” (p. 136); (c) that critical literacy concepts and its complicated metalanguage are best taught by exposing students to a range of texts dealing with a similar topic; and (d) that, despite
2 Reading is transactional in that readers’ personal experiences and responses shape their
understandings of texts (Rosenblatt, 1994). This allows the reader more authority to read beyond the text but not enough to examine power relations (McLaughlin & DeVoogd, 2004a).
initial hesitancy to challenge the authority of texts, students were empowered by critical literacy to contest and resist invited readings.
Other literature reports on studies that focused on multimodal design of texts that allowed students to explore firsthand the constructedness of texts while also making a social statement. Stevens and Bean (2007) report on a critical literacy study with high school seniors in Nebraska, USA. The teacher, frustrated by constraining curriculum requirements based on genre approaches to literature, decided to trial a critical inquiry into a local issue with her students. They explored how and why family-based farming, as the local economic base, had shifted significantly over the past few generations. To investigate changes in the agriculture industry and their local effects, students interviewed farmers, community leaders and others “using a critical lens to capture, describe and interpret the findings” (p. 87). The end product was a documentary created through a process of deconstructing the material effects of local social and economic events. The students, in assembling the documentary, had to decide which elements of the data and their interpretation and which design features would be included in their own representation of the issue in the documentary. In this way, they were asking critical literacy questions about representation during the reconstruction and authoring of their own text. Critical literacy questions that are often asked of commercially produced texts, for example,
whose interests are being served?; who is foregrounded or marginalised?, were
turned back on the students’ own texts, to help them deploy the resources of textual constructedness exposed by critical literacy. This project can be considered to lie at the transformative end of the critical literacy continuum as the documentary was then screened at a local venue to a full house from local and neighbouring districts. It went beyond the walls of the classroom or the school or district assessment panel, to the larger community who provided the class with positive feedback.
Stein (2008) documents similar practice in South Africa where a teacher asked his high school students to make a cine romane film (i.e., stills images with sound, music and dialogue) to represent a day in the life of their school. In the task, students needed to make decisions about what to include and exclude; whose voices to represent; what intended reading they wanted; and what images and wordings to choose for particular effects. The students in both Stein’s and Stevens and Bean’s (2007) studies used their own “voice”. They also used creative processes to explore
the power of texts, and they experienced the decision-making involved in exercising that power through design choices.
2.3.1 Critical aesthetics and emotionality in critical literacy
The relationship between critical literacy and aesthetics has been an uneasy one (Golsby-Smith, 2009), however, it is an area that critical literacy proponents are increasingly turning their attention toward. Misson and Morgan (2006) propose that an aesthetic text is one that has been formally structured to produce a certain kind of emotional response in the aesthetically attuned reader. They contend that the link between the aesthetic and ideology is in the territory of the value we ascribe to a text because of the values it promotes. They call this connection the “ideology of aesthetic texts” (p. 44) and connect the two thus: Ideology is a configuration of beliefs that shape how people operate in the world. The aesthetic is a way of knowing, they argue, and therefore aesthetics is inexorably bound up with ideology. This relationship happens in two ways in texts. First, aesthetic texts make us see the world in particular ways and draw our attention to certain things such as emotion. Second, through our affective involvement as readers, attitudes are created and we are encouraged to react positively or negatively towards ideas and attitudes presented in the text. We are, in critical literacy terms, “positioned” into seeing and valuing in particular ways. Both emotional and rational responses are, therefore, generated by aesthetic texts.
The concept of emotionality within critical English language teaching is also taken up by Lewis (2013) and Benesch (2012). Benesch contends that theories of emotions and affect are often neglected, at best treated tangentially, in critical English language teaching practice with EAL/D learners and research. She argues, however, that they can enrich critical language teaching, and are particularly relevant to English language teaching in neoliberal contexts. Benesch comments that while there are extensive rationales for including emotion in critical language teaching, there is scant evidence in the literature about its application. She does indicate, though, one study relevant to my project by Grey. Grey (2009), as discussed by Benesch (2012), investigated how her students in an Australian “English for Academic Purposes – Business” class responded emotionally to a large composite face image constructed of smaller images of each class member. It was a hybrid image of races and genders. Through the students’ emotional reactions to the
composite image – for example, glee and discomfort – she explored the ways the image disrupted conventional portraits (as texts) of various genders and races. She concluded that “difference” is shaped and re-shaped through bodies relating to one another. Misson (2012) claims that one cannot simply critique texts – both literary and non-literary – rationally without realising the way it is working on us emotionally; “No one ever started a revolution or fought for positive social change on logic alone: it is always informed by passion” (Misson, 2005, p. 46). This study seeks to identify whether the teachers include some element of affect or emotionality in their understandings and practice of critical literacy.
Section 2.3 has reviewed a range of studies exploring effective enactment of critical literacy in high school contexts. It identified a range of approaches to critical literacy and a range of specific foci, bas-reliefs depending on the context and the social agents involved. Chapter 6 identifies the approaches foregrounded by the teachers in this study and suggests some gaps in practice that may need to be addressed at institutional and policy levels. The next section reviews relevant literature relating to EAL/D learner positioning.
2.4 POSITIONING EAL/D LEARNERS IN RELATION TO CRITICAL