The implications of critical thinking reading strategies on the adult english program at Centro Colombo Americano

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(1)THE IMPLICATIONS OF CRITICAL THINKING READING STRATEGIES ON THE ADULT ENGLISH PROGRAM AT CENTRO COLOMBO AMERICANO. by. Oscar Ricardo Amórtegui González. A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education with an Emphasis in Bilingualism. at UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES C.I.F.E. Directed by Anne Marie Truscott de Mejia, PhD. Bogotá, DC May, 2012.

(2) Dedication. I lovingly dedicate this thesis to Angela, who supported me each step of the way and to all my family for all of their unending support.. Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the many friends, Professors and colleagues who have made this happen; especially Professor Anne Marie Truscott de Mejia who assisted me in my research.. 2.

(3) Table of contents Page 1. Abstract. 5. 2. Introduction. 6. 2.1. Research question. 8. 2.2. General Objective. 8. 2.3. Specific Objectives. 8. 2.4. Limitations. 9. 3. Theoretical Framework. 11. 3.1. Reading Processes in a Second Language. 11. 3.2. Reading Strategies. 14. 3.3. Critical thinking and Critical pedagogy Applied to Reading. 17. 4. Methodology. 21. 4.1. Context and Participants. 21. 4.2. Intervention. 22. 4.3. Study Design. 25. 4.4. Research Instruments. 26. 4.5. Data Analysis. 27. 4.6. Validity. 28. 4.7. Ethics. 29. 4.8. Timetable of the research study activities. 30. 3.

(4) 5. Results. 31. 5.1. Category 1: Development of critical thinking. 31. 5.2. Category 2: Motivation. 40. 5.3. Category 3: development of vocabulary. 46. 5.4. Pretests and Posttests results. 52. 5.5. Discussion. 55. 6. Conclusions 6.1. Implications. 57 58. 7. References. 60. 8. Appendices. 63. 4.

(5) 1.Abstract. The current research study implemented critical thinking strategies applied to reading during the courses skills 4, 5 and 6 (intermediate level) at the Adult English Program at Centro Colombo Americano, a non-formal institution that promotes the diffusion of English and its culture. I decided to focus my study on reading due to a personal analysis of the components of the program, recent approaches that highlight the importance of critical reading and the impressions and perceptions of previous students. Furthermore, it is one of the components that less development has had in the syllabus of the program. The implementation was carried out in a cycle of three months during the second semester of 2011. In order to do this, I provided additional reading materials to the ones proposed in the textbook. Furthermore, students were trained to use strategies to interpret, evaluate, infer meanings and be able to relate what they read to other contexts and their personal experiences. The main objective of this intervention was to analyze the possible impact this innovation might have on a group of students. The methodology was a concurrent mixed methods research. That is why quantitative (reading comprehension tests) and qualitative instruments (my own field notes, students’ products and interviews to the participants of the study) were used to collect data. Even though the quantitative results did not show a significant impact of the intervention, the triangulation of the qualitative data revealed principally three implications. First of all, students developed typical characteristics of critical thinking applied to reading; moreover, they increased their level of motivation towards English reading; finally, their vocabulary range was expanded. In conclusion, the intervention demonstrated that the implementation of critical reading strategies in the institution and the presentation of additional reading materials produced a positive impact in a particular group of students and that it can be integrated into the syllabus of the institution to complement students’ development of reading competences.. 5.

(6) 2.Introduction. Centro Colombo Americano (CCA) Bogotá is a non-formal educative institution located in the locality of Candelaria, downtown Bogota. This institution is dedicated to strengthening and promoting cultural understanding between the United States and Colombia. The English courses are one of its main components. They have several programs and the project was carried out in the Adult English Program. A more complete description of the institution is included in the methodology of the study. Precisely, after having taught for three years in this program, I am familiar with the methodological approach as well as the philosophy implemented by this institution. Indeed, the Adult English Program puts into practice multiple exercises and activities in order to promote English speaking and listening skills. The syllabus proposes the development of six different projects, which are divided into several tasks. Principally, these tasks highlight the importance of writing during the learning process; that is why it is very common that students write different sorts of English compositions to improve grammar, vocabulary and redaction in an ongoing process of writing, correction and rewriting. However, I consider reading as one of the aspects that might be strengthened the most in the program because officially, students only develop reading when they read short texts found in the textbooks of the courses. Generally, these texts are used to introduce or complement a topic of certain unit. Moreover, I need to say that when I have asked my students how much English reading they have outside class to complement their learning, most of them say that they just read in English for academic reasons (school or university) or because they have to do it at work (specific documents or reports for their jobs). It seems most students do not frequently read in English and none of the projects at the Colombo foster English Reading in an explicit way. Although there are projects in which students should do some sort of research, which implies reading, they can do this research in Spanish and they translate what they need afterwards. Another opinion from my students regarding reading could be seen when I taught unit 7 of the Top Notch Textbook (Ascher and Saslow, 2004), presented in the intermediate level 6.

(7) Skills 5. The unit title is ―books and magazines‖. The focal point of the unit is reading. Before the intervention, most of my students had claimed that they rarely or even never read any sort of English texts besides the textbook. Taking into account these aspects, I deduced that these students did not appreciate reading as an English learning strategy and they did not seem to appreciate it as a leisure activity either. Consequently, I was willing to implement an innovation regarding this issue by promoting the reading of different texts (articles, short stories, biographies, etc.) in addition to the ones presented in the textbook among students of the levels Skills 4, 5 and 6. These texts complemented the content and the topics of the course and they did not modify by any means the syllabus of the institution or the content of the book. Evidently, this reading implementation was complemented by a theoretical framework related to critical thinking, which fostered reading strategies for critical reading. The importance of the theory of critical thinking is evident in our society that constantly needs to reevaluate the way information is analyzed and interpreted. One of the most famous statements of Paulo Freire says that we cannot limit to read the word; rather we need to read the world, he says that ―each individual wins back the right to say his or her own word, to name the world‖ (Freire, 1970, p. 33)Therefore, I concluded that critical thinking would promote a better interpretation and analysis of the additional reading materials proposed in the course. It was hypothesized that participants of the study would have a significant improvement in the results they obtained during critical reading comprehension tests applied before and after the intervention. It means that all the participants took a pretest that dealt with critical reading comprehension without having been exposed to the pedagogical intervention and a posttest, with the same level of difficulty, at the end of the process. Nevertheless, the focus of this mixed methods research was not quantitative, because there were more qualitative components in the study. It was applied only one instrument to obtain quantitative data (the reading comprehension tests) whereas three qualitative instruments were used (my field notes, students’ products and interviews on the participants of the study). The improvement in critical reading comprehension tests, mentioned in the. 7.

(8) previous paragraph, was only one possible outcome of the intervention. Therefore, I will present more results of the study based on the qualitative data. Hence, the main intention was to foster critical conscious among students when they decode written words. These critical processes are cognitive processes which might help students not only improve their English reading comprehension but also, they might help students to become more autonomous in their learning process, be more analytic when reading texts, be less passive when they construct the meaning of different reading material among other possible implications to be discovered and exposed by analyzing the data collected.. 2.1. Research question What impact, if any, does the implementation of critical thinking strategies have on the English reading learning process among a group of students in the Adult English Program at Centro Colombo Americano?. 2.2. General Objective Promote English critical reading among s Skills 4, 5 and 6 students in the Adult English program at Centro Colombo Americano through the implementation of critical thinking strategies when reading the textbook as well as additional reading materials.. 2.3. Specific Objectives. 1. Strengthen the English reading process that students of the levels skills 4 to 6 have by applying Critical thinking reading strategies at Centro Colombo Americano.. 8.

(9) 2. Evaluate the impact, if any, of critical thinking reading strategies applied to the reading of different written materials among students of the levels Skills 4 to 6 at Centro Colombo Americano.. 2.4. Limitations The main limitation of the study was the fact that English courses at CCA usually have a small number of students. These courses have a maximum of 21 students and minimum 8. Usually the courses at this level have an average of 14 or 15 students. The implementation of the study was carried out in a cycle of three consecutive courses (Skills 4, 5 and 6) during three months. However, at CCA not all the students who start a course continue, because they may change schedules, postpone the course or even fail it. Then, during the transition from one course to another, some students do not continue and others started the process in the middle of the cycle, as they came from different courses. In my case, I started the cycle (Skills 4) with 14 students and only 6 of them continued with me until the end of the process in Skills 6. That means they became participants chosen by opportunity sample. In this sort of sampling, the participants are chosen because they are available at the time the study is carried out. This was an evident disadvantage, especially, for the quantitative instrument I applied, due to the fact that quantitative studies expect more participants to present pretests and posttests in order to obtain a higher level of validity and reliability in the analysis of the results. Precisely, during the presentation of the posttest, there was a participant who finished the test in a hurry because she wanted to leave the class quickly. I asked her about it afterwards, and she told me she had a personal issue that day so that she finished as fast as possible. Evidently, the result she got in the post-test was lower than the one she got during the pretest. Besides that, students at CCA come from very different backgrounds. The ages of the students of the Adult English Program are 16 and over, that is why the ages of the students of the courses vary constantly. During my experience as a teacher at the institution, I have seen students who are professionals who have finished their undergraduate or graduate 9.

(10) studies at university; current university students from all kind of programs; nonprofessional employees; teenagers who have just finished high school and people who are neither working nor studying. Clearly, my participants were not the exception and they had very different backgrounds. Three of them were university students from different programs, two of them had finished high school and were working at the moment of the study and the other participant had recently graduated from university. Because of this, they had very different conceptions and experiences with reading, and at certain point, it was difficult to discover if some possible implications of the intervention were the result of their previous involvement with reading in other contexts. Nevertheless, I clarified what findings might have had this sort of influence during the triangulation, and showed evidence to support the results that came directly from the intervention.. 10.

(11) 3.Theoretical Framework. In order to start analyzing the reading processes at Centro Colombo Americano I have decided to divide the literature review into different sections that deal with issues that are related and pertinent to clarify the study. First of all, I will present different studies and research that focus on reading in a Second Language (L2). Since the reading process that I deal with is not in a first language (L1), there are several matters that need to be taken into consideration. Secondly, there will be a review of different information and research studies about reading learning strategies. Finally, I will show different research studies that discuss the concept of critical thinking and critical pedagogy when they are applied to optimize reading processes.. 3.1. Reading Processes in a Second Language Thonis (1978) analyzed the concept of reading in an L2. He showed that it is possible to believe that one can start tackling L2 reading by comparing and contrasting the reading process that is developed in the L1. From this perspective, one should simply consider the obvious formal differences, that is to say grammar syntax and range of vocabulary (level of competence in an L2). However, the reader who faces reading in an L2 has stored in his memory a structure of concepts, images and ideas that are quite relevant when interpreting a text, which goes beyond formal aspects. Clearly, the readers were not only categorized according to their level of competence in the L2, but also according to the competence they have in their L1. Obviously, it is not the same to analyze a child that is learning to read and write in his or her mother tongue and an L2 at the same time (biliteracy). What Thonis said helped me categorize the population at Centro Colombo Americano. The participants of the study were already competent in reading processes in their L1 because all of them had already finished high school and one participant had even graduated from University. This categorization of the population is very relevant since it gives certain advantages when implementing reading strategies. According to Baker (2006), there is a process of transfer. 11.

(12) of L1 reading skills to reading in an L2. To be brief, transfer implies that the control of reading abilities in the mother tongue allows for the development of cognitive strategies and skills that favor reading in a second language. From my pedagogical experience, I have seen that L1 referents help students understand the structure of different kinds of readings. Students usually pay attention to text markers such as headings, titles, subtitles and images as they would do in their first language. The idea of transfer is interesting because it was possible to predict that the reading abilities that the CCA students develop in an L2 would transfer to their L1. Baker did not mention this aspect because, from his point of view, transfer was usually exemplified as the transfer of abilities from an L1 to an L2 and not the other way around. However, there are other studies in which they mention the influence that reading in a second language has on the reading process in the mother tongue. Geva, Wade-Woolley and Shany (2002) did some research about this. They compared the development of reading efficiency in two languages among children in an immersion school in Canada. They tested children’s ability to read in terms of speed, accuracy and comprehension. The children’s first language was English and the second language they were learning was Hebrew. There was not a simultaneous process of literacy because the students were already proficient in English by the time they started with Hebrew. It is interesting to notice that both of them are languages with significant differences and they even have different writing systems. In the findings, the researchers noticed that good and poor readers are correlated. This means that in the study a good reader in English got good results when reading in Hebrew and that a bad reader in English also had a bad reading performance when the texts were in Hebrew. It was also found that there was not a direct relationship between oral fluency of the language and reading proficiency. This means that a fluent speaker of both languages got low results in both reading tests if the learner was not a skillful reader. However, they did notice that the lowest reading results were obtained by the students with the lowest level of proficiency in the L2. Another interesting finding, in the same study, was the ability for letter naming (the ability to name or spell all the letters of a word). With regard to this aspect, students performed well in English, but they got poor results in Hebrew in all of the cases (letter naming results. 12.

(13) were always lower in the L2). Nevertheless, some students decoded Hebrew with good speed, accuracy and comprehension despite significant problems with letter naming. Spelling accuracy was not a reliable indicator of reading proficiency. Coming back to the subject of reading strategies, which will be explained in detail in the next section, and the transfer of reading abilities from an L1 to an L2, I want to discuss the case study of Rodriguez and Rodriguez (2009) in which they identified the most common reading strategies used by bilingual students in a high school in Mexico. The conclusion was that students normally selected different strategies when reading (cognitive, metacognitive and socioaffective strategies), even if they were not aware of them. However, there was a better reading performance in students who became conscious of the best moments to apply certain reading strategies according to the effectiveness they had during different situations. For example, when students read a text with difficult vocabulary, socioaffective strategies of clarification provided learners with excellent results. The other conclusion was related to the transfer of reading comprehension skills from the L1 to the L2. The authors of the study say: ―students with an acceptable level of English, transfer most of their first language reading strategies to their second language reading process because first language provides students with a set of skills and metalinguistic knowledge that can be easily transferred when learning another language‖ (Rodriguez and Rodriguez, 2009, p. 12) Taking into account the results of Geva, Wade-Woolley and Shany (2002) about reading efficiency in the L2 in contrast with the L1, as well as the results of Rodriguez and Rodriguez (2009) about the transfer of reading abilities from an L1 to an L2, I want to make reference to Williams (2004) who says that two basic components are necessary in order to understand a written text in an L2: a good level of reading comprehension in the L1 and a suitable level of competence in the L2. It is complex to label a student saying either he or she is competent enough or not. Anyhow, Williams claims that a competent L2 reader needs to dominate both the syntax and vocabulary of the target language. With regard to these two aspects exposed by Williams, we need to clarify his idea. On the one hand, syntax facilitates the understanding of the grammatical context of the text since. 13.

(14) the reader can identify the subject or doer of the action, the object or receiver of it as well as the action proposed. Basically, syntax competence avoids misinterpretations. On the other hand, vocabulary is more relevant for developing L2 reading competence. There is a direct correlation between the amount of vocabulary you have and the level of reading competence proficiency. Yet, it is not necessary to have an extremely good vocabulary command of the L2 to reach a good reading comprehension level. This happens due to the fact that 80 percent of the content of most of the texts is written by using only 2000 basic words. However, the more complex the text is, the more necessary it is to have a command of more than this 80 percent of basic vocabulary. This happens because the main semantic implications of the text fall upon the other 20 percent of vocabulary. That is to say, the main ideas are expressed by using advanced vocabulary in the most challenging texts. Finally, I want to complement this advantage that students with a wide lexical range seem to have. Nassaji (2006), did some research to study the relationship between the depth of vocabulary knowledge a group of learners of English had and the percentage of use of inferencing strategies in a successful way. As expected, Nassaji shows that there is a significant relationship between the learners with a stronger knowledge of complex vocabulary and the percentage of successful inferencing strategy use. This means that a deep knowledge of vocabulary supports lexical inferencing strategies. So, learners are more effective inferring unknown vocabulary when they have a solid level of vocabulary. Precisely, this introduction to reading strategies fits perfectly with the second concept to be explored in this literature review.. 3.2. Reading Strategies The second important concept related to this study is reading strategies. These are specific steps carried out in order to improve reading processes. According to Palinscar and Brown (1984), teaching reading strategies allows students to optimize reading comprehension, but it is necessary for students to know explicitly what kind of strategy they are using. With this in mind, they can become aware of their own learning process developing metacognitive skills. 14.

(15) There are several reading strategies and I will mention some of the ones that are relevant for this project. First of all, Brushaber (2003) refers to some basic reading strategies: identification of the reading purpose, previous knowledge generation, prediction, previewing, monitoring, discussion of the text and reading replies through comments. The main purpose of these reading strategies is not to limit the reader to being a passive participant in the reading process, which means that it is the first step to develop critical reading strategies. Let us focus on the field of reading strategies applied to optimize reading processes in an L2. Parra (2008) did some research in a bilingual school in Bogotá in which she used reading strategies in an explicit way in order to explore what progress 8 – 9 year old children might have in their L2 (English) reading comprehension. She used both, quantitative pre-tests and post-tests as well as qualitative interviews and think aloud protocols to get her final results. At the end of the study, Parra said that students showed progress in their reading comprehension processes. They were able to retell different written texts including more secondary events and rising a greater level of complexity than at the beginning. Students were also reported to have fewer mistakes and more precision when they described different aspects of the texts. A more effective use of reading strategies was also evident during the performance of the post-tests. She reported that the strategies students used the most were: prediction, word inference, verification, connection and retelling. The strategies that did not show any significant improvement during the post-tests were question formulation and mental image evocation. Among other findings, Parra concluded that reading abilities should be developed in the L1 first and then they might be applied in the L2. It is this way because students transferred effectively some reading abilities they had developed previously in their mother tongue. This process should be developed along with explicit instruction of reading abilities. As a matter of fact, she proposed that all the programs dealing with reading should include explicit reading strategies. Finally, the most significant deficiencies found during the study are not having studied an older population in which the L1 reading skills had been more developed than in these young students and not having collected information in the L1 so 15.

(16) that students could express themselves more clearly about the improvement of their reading processes. During my research, I took into account this last limitation and I designed the interviews of the study in Spanish so that students were able to express their opinions about the process clearly in their mother tongue. A similar research study was carried out by de Graaf, Koopman, Anikina and Westhoff (2007). Once again, the population belongs to a formal context, this time secondary school students who are older than the children of the previous research study but still younger than the CCA population. The researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of learning strategies implementation on content and language integrated learning in the Netherlands. Although the research shows different kinds of learning strategies, they mentioned some specific reading strategies, in particular skimming, previewing, scanning, paraphrasing, summarizing and making inferences The results proved that these strategies helped students overcome difficulties presented when students read in an L2, ―all these strategies help the reader to understand meaning, structures and relationships between different parts of the text‖ (Parra, 2007, p. 618). Effective language teaching performance by using learning strategies was the main focus of the study. About the limitations of the study, they recommend doing some research about teacher training on learning strategies because most of the studies focus on students but they do not analyze teacher professional development. As a final point in the reading strategies section, I want to indicate the importance of classifying learning strategies according to the level of knowledge of students and the level of complexity of the strategies themselves. Vygotsky (1978) describes his famous Zone of Proximal Development (ZDP) and he claims that a student should develop mental processes under teacher guidance and supervision. First of all, the student should be presented with a problem so that he can solve it along with instructor’s help and then, the student will continue with a more complex problem. This way, the student will develop autonomy progressively, which will allow him to solve these kinds of problems independently, ―what is in the zone of proximal development will be the actual developmental level tomorrow, that is, what a child can do with assistance today, he will be able to do it by himself tomorrow‖ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 87). 16.

(17) 3.3. Critical thinking and Critical pedagogy Applied to Reading Before I start focusing on critical thinking or critical pedagogy applied to reading, I would like to clarify general aspects of these terms. Ruggiero (2008) says that critical thinking is a trend used and applied by several authors and researchers. Consequently, it belongs to a huge number of professional fields and academic disciplines. Critical thinking deals with the acquisition and careful interpretation of all kind of information with the aim of getting a reasonable conclusion that is absolutely justified. The importance of critical thinking is highlighted because it allows any individual to analyze, evaluate, explain and restructure his own thought, permitting to get higher levels of comprehension. Something really interesting in Ruggiero’s definition is that he claims that thinking is a human manifestation opposed to feelings. Thinking is a conscious mental state carried out to solve a problem, make a decision or obtain knowledge in contrast to feelings. Accordingly, the following quotation from Facione reflects a similar position. ―At one level we all know what critical thinking means — it means good thinking, almost the opposite of illogical, irrational, thinking. But when we test our understanding further, we run into questions‖ (2011, p 2). It means that in this intricate process new cognitive abilities are born. The main cognitive abilities are interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation. These critical thinking abilities are suitable to be connected with L2 reading, they are in fact reading learning strategies and they were applied in the study at CCA. Basically, a reader who follows critical thinking reading strategies is not limited to repeat what the text says, but he is also able to say how and why it is said. On the other hand, the concept of critical pedagogy is linked to critical thinking. Indeed, one of the most important authors on this is topic is Freire (1970). He states that education is produced within an oppressive order and that is why is necessary for oppressed people to inquire themselves about why this situation is happening. Regarding reading, Freire proposes a fascinating process: describing is not enough, you have to interpret; comprehension is not enough, you have to analyze; there cannot be a passive recitation process, but there should be a critical judgment process. He means that we cannot be passive and he demands that we should transform the world. In his own words ―the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its 17.

(18) constitutive elements… …there is no true word that is not at the same time praxis‖ (Freire, 1970, p. 87). If we center on critical pedagogy applied to L2 reading we can make reference to Cummins (2003). He says that literacy, even literacy in a second language, is a poor objective in education if it is taught only as ―functional literacy‖. The reason for this is that literacy will fail in its real significant objective, that is to promote critical literacy. Cummins uses Freire’s ideas and he says that students should not just ―read the word‖, but they should ―read the world‖. According to Cummins, political interests do not allow this ideal process to be developed in order to perpetuate predefined power structures. ―I argue that the public focus and apparent political commitment to improving the ability of students to read the word represents a facade that obscures and underlying societal structure that continues to discourage students from Reading the world (Cummins, 2003, p. 1). Evidently, there is a sociological and even political position as Cummins encourages critical reading at school as a way to transform hegemonic dominations that he defines as ―predefined power structures‖. Finally, I want to discuss two academic articles related to critical literacy. The first one is written in Brazil and its title is ―Encouraging critical reading in the EFL classroom‖ (Correia, 2006). The author criticizes English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks because the reading comprehension exercises only deal with a superficial level of comprehension. They facilitate teacher work, but limiting learners’ critical opinion. As I mentioned in the introduction to the study, the reading activities in the syllabus of the CCA are limited to the articles of the textbooks, at least at the moment this study is being written. Although teachers can bring extra reading material to class this hardly ever happens as I have found out after asking some of my colleagues. Correia (2006) exemplifies an activity she carried out with a newspaper article appropriated to the level and age of the students. The article was not in the textbook of the course. The first step in the activity was a warm-up activity in which she made students relate the content of the article to their own context. Then, students applied some prediction and skimming reading strategies. In the next activity students were asked to create two questions that could possibly be answered in the. 18.

(19) article, which was called reciprocal questioning. When the students read, the objective was to see if the text was able to answer those questions. If the questions were not answered, they needed to discuss why the text did not include those answers (the importance of the information omitted) and they tried to answer those questions by using their own knowledge. As a post-reading activity, she told students to reflect on the structures used in the article (passive voice, active voice, adjectives used) in order to deduce the main aim of the article (informing, influencing, entertaining, etc.). The findings from this activity established that it was highly appealing for students as it encouraged a lot of participation. It is evident that the reading activity required students to be totally active and they constructed and negotiated meaning. Correia also reported that her students started to question the truth of written texts and they detected the way some readings are biased. The final article I will mention is the column written by Linder (2000) who shares Correia’s opinion of bringing authentic material into the classroom. In this respect, Linder says that authentic materials in the EFL (English as a foreign language) environment are different items that are used in the classroom, despite the fact they were not originally created for use in the classroom. Then, menus from restaurants will be ―authentic materials used as realia‖, but also, spoons, plates or other kind of objects that are used as a complement to the lesson content can become ―authentic materials‖. Nevertheless, Linder mentions the materials that can be used as ―texts‖, resources that include written samples of the target language. I want now to focus on what Linder defines as ―authentic texts‖. He says that they are useful and rich models of the target language and they help students to be exposed to the language culture. Correspondingly, authentic texts play an important role in students’ motivation. Linder encourages teachers to introduce texts that are not normally presented in the EFL classroom. Unfortunately, he says that teachers sometimes refrain from using authentic texts because they are afraid of intimidating students in dealing with complicated language. The suggestions are quite. 19.

(20) interesting. Now we are dealing with students’ motivation generated because of authentic material introduced in the classroom. As a conclusion, I want to emphasize the importance of integrating all of these processes when teaching, guiding or instructing L2 reading (development of reading in a second language, reading learning strategies, critical thinking, critical pedagogy applied to reading and students’ motivation generated from authentic material). All of these aspects were a component of the research study at CCA because there was also development of reading in a second language (English). In order to do it, reading learning strategies were implemented following parameters of critical thinking. 20.

(21) 4. Methodology. 4.1. Context and Participants The Centro Colombo Americano is a non-profit foundation that offers different language programs that aim at different populations. The Adult English Program is the main program and it was precisely the one in which the project took place. In the Adult English Program, students take two-hour classes Monday through Friday in different schedules from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 pm. The Adult Program has four distinct blocks of courses that are called Basic, Skills, Challenge and Advance. The first three blocks: Basic, Skills and Challenge are divided into six different monthly courses each one, which means 18 different courses in total. The Advance block offers specialized courses for specific purposes (Pronunciation, advanced grammar, advanced listening, TOEFL preparation, etc.). As was already mentioned, the project was carried out over three months with students who take the Skill courses 4 to 6, that is to say, the courses 10, 11 and 12 (intermediate levels). Students usually take these three courses with the same teacher as far as they do not change their schedule. I decided to work with these courses because in Skills 5 students need to deal with a unit in the textbook about reading habits. Since the project is about critical thinking strategies applied to reading, it is a good opportunity for students to reflect on their own reading habits and the implications of applying critical reading strategies. Moreover, students have already consolidated a sufficient English level so that they can deal with different reading materials (articles, magazines, books, etc.) beyond the textbook of the course. The participants of the study were chosen by using opportunity sampling due to the fact that I was assigned that cycle of courses only once during the semester of the study. So I simply worked with all the students who registered in the course, the population that was readily available. As I explained in the limitations section, at the beginning of the course, there were 14 students and I started to apply the different research instruments to all of 21.

(22) them because I could not foresee what students were going to stay through the three courses. At the end of the process, the six students who completed the entire process became my participants. At the moment of the research study, the characteristics of the participants were as follows1:. Giselle: female. University student of international trade, 18 years old. Pedro: male. He had just finished high school and it was currently working, 17 years old. Carolina: she had just finished studying Television Production at University, 22 years old. Armando: University student of economy, 22 years old. Kelly: University student of accountant, 21 years old. María. Non-professional employee, 19 years old.. 4.2. Intervention In order to describe my intervention, I will first describe the reading processes that are held at the Colombo with courses Skills 4 to 6. These reading activities are dependent on the content of the textbook of the course. There are ten units in the textbook and every unit has 4 different lessons. Each unit has a reading activity in either lesson three or four. That is to say, students normally face ten different reading activities throughout the three month course. According to the unit walk-through of the textbook, all the readings have been based on authentic sources. However, the language has been simplified to facilitate students’ understanding. The first activity proposed in these readings is called ―reading warm-up questions‖. This exercise has some questions that help students think about the topic of the reading. Students relate the content of the reading to their own lives before going to the text. The process facilitates understanding and promotes interest among the students. Then, students read the 1. The names of the participants are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.. 22.

(23) text and they are encouraged to understand the reading without looking up all the unknown words. When they finish, they need to carry out some comprehension activities that always follow the reading. In these post-reading activities, there are two kinds of questions: either true/false activities or straight factual questions (open questions that only have one possible answer). The book promotes reading strategies such as predicting, scanning, summarizing and other strategies that aim at building vocabulary and facilitate understanding. In the pedagogical innovation, I proposed the expansion of reading activities by assigning additional texts to the ones presented in the textbook. The readings were always related to the content of the book, the project or the syllabus so that students did not see these readings as material that was not part of the course. The decision to expand the readings of the textbook was based on a point of view that says that critical reading requires a broader text analysis than only the textbook. For instance, when dealing with critical applied linguistics Pennycook mentions: ―if students are to learn how to read the world critically, they must be given access to discourses that can allow them to analyze that world, discourses that can enable them to explore the ways in which their own reading acts, as well as the texts of their culture, are embedded in complex social and historical relations‖ (Pennycook, 2001, pp. 113). Students were given access to one extra reading material per unit, which meant ten additional texts read during the study. In addition to this extra reading assignment, students were taught critical thinking reading strategies. Learning strategies are a consistent part of the syllabus at CCA. For example, teachers are required to write communicative, language and learning objectives on the board before starting the class and learning objectives usually include explicit learning strategies. This process with learning strategies usually follows the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) instructional framework proposed by Rebecca Oxford (1999). She mentions five phases when training students with the use of learning strategies. A brief description of the stages proposed by Oxford is as follows: 1. Preparation: the teacher creates the necessity or moment for students to work with certain learning strategy as students identify their prior knowledge about the use of specific strategies.. 23.

(24) 2. Presentation: the teacher introduces the learning strategy naming it in an explicit way. The teacher also shows how, when and why to use the learning strategy. 3. Practice: students have an exercise or activity in which they are required to use the learning strategy the way it was explained. 4. Evaluation: when students finish the exercise or activity, they evaluate and reflect upon the use of the learning strategy to determine how useful is for them. 5. Expansion: Students expand the use of the learning strategy by practicing it an additional activity in class or as homework. Reading strategies are also taught this way, as they are learning strategies. However, the only reading strategies included in the syllabus of this course are previewing, comparing, predicting and summarizing. The syllabus also mentions the fact that students should express feelings or opinions about the readings and they should express and identify the point of view of the author. There are no explicit critical thinking reading strategies though. That is why I decided to promote the use of the following critical reading strategies to be used when reading the articles of the textbook and the additional reading materials. These strategies were based on descriptions done by Rivera (2006). Evaluating: students should decide whether the material they read is good, bad, accurate and so forth. Students need to support they opinion providing reasons. Inferring: students should infer the meaning of something although is not written explicitly. Rivera defines it as ―reading between the lines‖. Interpreting: students should express in their own words a personal short interpretation of something read. This is a creative process because there are several interpretations of the same text and there is not an interpretation that is unique. Making connections: students should connect what is written on the text to their own personal experiences or other sources of information.. 24.

(25) Comparing and contrasting: students should analyze closely two or more texts in order to find similarities and differences. These five strategies were implemented in a systematic way throughout the three months of the study. The strategies were taught according to the topics and texts students were reading. A more detailed description of the process carried out is included in the field notes of the study.. 4.3. Study Design The present study followed the principles of the constructivist paradigm. This is due to the fact that the main interest of the study is to interpret the implications of critical thinking strategies applied to the reading process during the Skills 4-6 courses that I teach at Centro Colombo Americano. This interpretation was taken directly from data given by my participants that collaborated with the construction of knowledge since they were facing critical thinking strategies during their reading processes. Thus, I needed to rely entirely on the interviews and products they produced, linked to my impressions narrated in field notes, to reach an understanding of the situation. On the other hand, the quantitative data I obtained through the pre-tests and post-tests helped me support and expand the conclusions I had with the qualitative data. My study was a concurrent mixed methods research. Principally, it means that I collected both, qualitative and quantitative data to answer a single qualitative question. The two types of data were collected independently at the same time, that is to say, during the three months of the cycle of the three courses. The dominant status design was qualitative because the three qualitative instruments had a greater emphasis than the quantitative instrument. The quantitative as well as the qualitative data were analyzed independently before they were compared to reach the final conclusions.. 25.

(26) 4.4. Research Instruments Field notes: during the implementation of the pedagogical intervention with critical reading strategies, I made notes about the observations I carried out in the classes of the 3 courses. The field notes were done after the classes in which I applied the critical reading strategies and they were kept in a notebook. It was important to write the field notes as soon as I finished each class to avoid distortions of the information. Students’ products: all the students who took the courses were required to write some reflections in which they gave their impressions and opinions about different topics included in reading exercises. The students were following critical reading strategies. The products were created in the units 2, 3, 6, 7, 8 and 10. That is to say, each participant wrote two reflections per course. Students did not create a product for every single unit because it would have been overwhelming for them, since they were coping with the development of the project and the tasks included in the syllabus of the program. Interviews: At the end of the three month process, I designed semi-structured interviews for my six participants. The questions were related to their reading process during the development of the project and some colleagues gave me suggestions about the relevance of the questions. The participants were able to give their opinions, positive and negative, about the implementation of critical reading strategies and the extra reading material they had read in class. Two group interviews were done, each one with three participants, in order to facilitate the data analysis. The interviews helped me clarify some aspects of the project I could not see in the field notes or in the student’s products. Reading Comprehension Tests: I applied pretests and posttests in order to discover if students had a significant improvement after the implementation of critical reading strategies applied to reading. The tests were adapted from: http://www.majortests.com/. This is a website that provides free tests that can be used with educative purposes. Each test included two different passages about a specific topic. There were two multiple choice questions about each passage, two multiple choice questions that made relationships between the two passages and two open questions that asked about the intention of the author of each passage.. 26.

(27) In order to validate the tests, some professors at University checked the tests to identify whether they had the same difficulty or not. One of them suggested that I should use ―readability index calculator‖, an online program that provides a measurement about how easy a test is to be read (according to the complexity of vocabulary, syntax, extension, etc.). I measured all the passages and I modified the most difficult passages to get similar tests in terms of difficulty. Then, I piloted the tests with 10 students of the Colombo who were not participants of the study. Five of them took test A first and test B afterwards. The other five students had the opposite order, so they took first test B and then test A. I compared the results and there were not any significant differences that indicated that one test was more difficult than the other. After the tests were carefully piloted, they were applied to the participants of the study. First, 14 students took the pretest before starting the intervention. Subsequently, six participants who were during the whole intervention took also the posttests. The results of these six participants were analyzed.. 4.5. Data Analysis In order to answer the research questions I followed two different processes, qualitative and quantitative, due to the nature of my mixed methods research. First of all, I triangulated the qualitative data collected through the three qualitative instruments. The information of the field notes and the students’ products was already written and I made copies of them. Also, the interviews were transcribed to have all the information written. Afterwards, I read and reread each instrument carefully and I used different colors looking for common codes. This way, I was able to compare the codes of the three instruments. As a result, different categories were established following emergent coding because there was an examination of the data that found elements and concepts in common among the three instruments. At the end, three main categories emerged from the triangulation. The process with the quantitative data was different. In this case, I compared the results of the pretests and the posttests using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which is a non-. 27.

(28) parametric test. I used this test because the tests were applied to the same population in order to see if there was a significant improvement in the performance of the participants. I created graphics with the software SPSS and these graphics were described and interpreted.. 4.6. Validity I applied different strategies to validate the interpretation of the current research. These strategies included: triangulation, peer debriefing, persistent observation and negative case analysis. Triangulation was used so that I was able to compare data gathered through different qualitative instruments. It was useful and pertinent to analyze and explain my findings from more than just one position. The fact that I contrasted different instruments to create different categories gave me a more detailed, accurate and balanced description of the situation. The peer debriefing process was developed as I had another teacher at my institution, my supervisor, who read my research process in order to review the implementation and evolution of my study. This is due to the fact that there is a performance plan at Centro Colombo Americano and all the teachers are required to carry out research in their teaching. The supervisor, who is also an English teacher at the same program I am working in, is in charge of providing feedback about the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data collection and the data analysis procedures. Persistent observation refers to the use of an adequate number of observations during my research. I worked as a teacher with my Skills 4 – 6 group (in which I had the six participants) for three months and I had enough time to do all the necessary procedures for the study (design the instruments, choose the additional reading material, implement critical reading strategies, observe my group and write field notes). Finally, I had a negative case analysis since I discussed elements of my data collected that did not support the patterns or explanations or that somehow contradicted the study. This. 28.

(29) happened especially with the quantitative data. This process helped me revise and broaden the patterns emerged during the study to refine the research.. 4.7. Ethics It is interesting to notice that students of the Adult program of the Centro Colombo Americano are always required to sign a consent form in which they authorize the institution to have class observations, interviews, surveys, recordings and analysis of their class products (compositions, portfolios, tasks, etc.). They do this even when no research or observation is carried out. This way, students get to know the fact that the Colombo is doing research and evaluation of its programs constantly. I took advantage of this consent form so that students expressed their agreement with my research process. Additionally, I explained the characteristics of my research process before they signed the consent form. Since I needed to refer the participants during the data analysis, I decided to use pseudonyms to avoid using their real names. The Centro Colombo Americano was informed of the project quite before starting the study and they approved it. I was allowed to use the name of the institution and the Academic Director of CCA is one of the readers of the project. Indeed, it is extremely useful to receive feedback from the Academic Director because she knows in detail the processes and methodology carried out in the institution.. 29.

(30) 4.8. Timetable of the research study activities. Activity. July. August. Design of instruments. 1st -. -13th. Beginning of the courses. Collection of Students’. September. October. Skills 4. Skills 5. Skills 6. 16th. 13th. 10th. November. 24th -. - 2nd. Pretests. Posttests. 17th. 3rd. products Pretests and posttests. Interviews. 4th. 30.

(31) 5.Results. The first results presented will be the categories obtained from the qualitative analysis. Subsequently, the result obtained from the quantitative analysis will be shown.. 5.1. Category 1: Development of critical thinking The development of critical thinking through English reading is one of the main aspects of this research because I am principally interested in discovering the impact certain critical thinking reading strategies have among a group of students at Centro Colombo Americano. In order to present the findings, I will take into account data analyzed from three different instruments: field notes (my observations in class), students’ products (texts written by students in class about the readings) and interviews applied at the end of the intervention. The first reference to critical thinking is related to the fact that the reader knows that the capacity to read in a second language is going to bring him/her certain benefits. These are created when the reader adopts a kind of text (a foreign language) into his social practice: ―literacy is in and of itself beneficial… …learning standard English will somehow bestow all sorts of benefits on its users‖ (Pennycook, 2001, pp. 77). It is possible to observe this situation in the first extract, which shows three participants’ opinions taken from the interviews: Extract 1 Maria: …eso es muy importante (leer en inglés) porque es una habilidad que tú tienes, eh… para… para desarrollar tu carrera y es algo que prácticamente, que lo exigen actualmente, pues si tú quieres tener un buen trabajo y si quieres seguir progresando, entonces pues leer en ingles me parece muy bueno. Además, porque hay muchos textos que te actualizan en tu carrera y a nivel general que están escritos en inglés, entonces es bueno tener acceso a documentos o textos que están en ingles y que te pueden brindar información. Kelly: hay muchas investigaciones en inglés muy recientes que son muy interesantes, que son muy importantes y que por lo recientes igual están en inglés y todavía no las han traducido, y si uno las traduce pues igual se pierde, y puede. 31.

(32) resultar una traducción que no es clara y se puede uno confundir, puede no entender el tema. Armando: de pronto también para mi proyecto de vida personal. Me gustaría también dedicarme como a la vida académica y pues para eso es fundamental tener un nivel de lectura en inglés grande, porque la gran masa de textos sobretodo económicos, algunos temas ya rigurosos, académicos, pues están escritos es en inglés. Entonces eso amplifica también como la visión que uno puede tener de determinados temas.. Thus, we can see that María says that the reading ability in English is a benefit that allows people to get better jobs. According to her, this ability will allow her to get a better working position and make progress in life. She also says that there are many documents in her field of studies that are written in English. Likewise, Kelly mentions that there are several research documents available exclusively in English. Furthermore, she claims that translations are not good options because they might not be accurate enough. Finally, Armando says that he expects to have an academic life in the field of economics. Therefore, English reading will become an essential part of his project of life. All these three opinions show evidence of the same belief: the capacity to deal with English readings allows people to access different kinds of knowledge that are not available in their mother tongue (Spanish). In particular, the participants make reference to academic texts. In this respect, critical thinking applied to reading highlights the importance of developing discourse competences. Let us remember that critical reading applied to English texts will not only allow people to be able to read in a foreign language, but it also implies that people will be able to express critical opinions on any kind of material they read (Facione, 2011). In fact, there is one participant who claims explicitly the desire to interpret texts critically in order to get good academic results. Here is her opinion about the importance of reading a text critically taken from her interview. Extract 2 Kelly: …eso sería como muy importante para el desarrollo de mi inglés y pues para seguirme desarrollando pero además, también no solo poder entenderlos (textos en inglés) sino que poder hacer una lectura crítica del texto o sea no es solamente quedarme en entenderlo sino ir más allá del texto, de lo que se dice.. 32.

(33) It is possible to observe that critical reading is, for this particular student, a desire to go beyond understanding texts; she wants to read them critically in order to accomplish personal and professional objectives. This is coherent with basic concepts of critical thinking applied to reading, since students should develop the ability to differentiate facts from opinions, understand the author’s explicit and implicit objectives, value the reliability of different sources of information consulted, criticize different texts and develop high levels of metacognition (Ruggiero, 2008). On the other hand, with the pedagogical intervention students were able to express critical opinions when reading about different topics. For instance, students read a text in which an international organization (McSpotlight) promotes a boycott against the famous multinational McDonalds. Basically, McSpotlight denounces McDonalds through different arguments in which the multinational is condemned because of different practices, which affect the environment, other companies’ economies and the consumers themselves. The students gave their own opinions about McDonalds and they took into account the information of the article as well as their previous attitudes towards the company. In this way, I discovered that six students did not agree with the information of the article. Instead, they said that the organization McSpotlight might have some particular interests against McDonalds. We can observe this in the comments two students wrote during the reading exercise, which are part of the students’ products. Extract 3 Armando: I think that McDonalds is a good company. The food is good, is cheap and the dishes are made with excellents (sic) qualities, the articles or the bad information could be for the war between companies. Carolina: I think that McDonalds is a good business example, and the ice creams are excellent. It is a powerful multi-national with good management policys (sic).. It is interesting to see that these two participants, in spite of finding a text with solid arguments criticizing McDonalds, used their previous experiences and knowledge about the multinational to give positive comments about it (the food is good, is cheap, McDonalds is 33.

(34) a good business example, the ice creams are excellent). Students recognized the intention of the text and they queried the points of view and arguments expressed in it. These opinions already show evidence of critical thinking because there is an evaluation of the arguments of the text whether to share or not the conclusions of the text. These opinions are not an isolated case, because more than half of the students (six out of eleven) disagreed with the strong position of the text against McDonalds. There is evidence of this aspect in the field notes taken after that class. Extract 4 …students like Nicolas, Lady, Laura and Carolina said that they liked McDonalds and that they do not care about the information of the article. They said that the article exaggerates the information as there are many companies that are doing the same actions and they try to show McDonalds as the only company that is doing that… …I told them to raise their hands to know how many students were in favor and against McDonalds and the total was: 6 students against McDonalds and 5 in favor of it.. Hence, critical thinking deals with careful interpretation and acquisition of every kind of information in order to obtain a reasonable and justified conclusion. That is to say, one of the components of critical thinking is the capacity to evaluate arguments and statements to determine which ones have merit to be believed (Ruggiero, 2008). This is also very similar to the findings of Correia (2006), who reported how students started to detect bias in authentic texts and how they questioned the position of these readings. Additional data also show evidence of critical thinking during the reading exercises. For instance, in another extract from my field notes, I described the analysis of an article included in the textbook that presents global problems affecting the world. The problems referred to are poverty, corruption, terrorism and racism. As a critical thinking reading exercise, students were told to identify other global problems that are not mentioned in the text. Later, students were supposed to enumerate in order of importance the five most relevant problems that are affecting our society the most. Students could use either the topics proposed in the book or their own ideas. Again, I am going to refer to my field notes to show evidence of students’ critical thinking processes.. 34.

(35) Extract 5 All of the groups concluded that the article was missing problems related to the environment (global warming, pollution, contamination, etc). It is an evident global problem that is not mentioned in the article. Armando claimed that it is not included because the article is kind of old (2004). However, the other students replied and said that environmental problems already existed by that time. Instead, they said that it is not included because the article was written in the USA. Giselle clarified this idea and she said that the United States does not care about the environment because it is not convenient for their economy. To support her idea, she mentioned the Kyoto protocol and she said that the United States did not support it.. This is another example of critical thinking because the information written was criticized. This happened when students inferred the reason why environmental problems were not included in an article that deals with the most significant global problems. The conclusion of Armando was that the article had been written seven years ago, but the other students did not agree with him because environmental problems were already evident by 2004. On the other hand, Giselle took into account the political and cultural context of the country in which the article was written and she made a relationship with her previous knowledge about the Kyoto protocol and the American position about it. There is evidence from a different instrument to support this argument in this particular class. Another student also demonstrated her position about the article. She considered that the list of global problems presented in the text was missing another problem different to environment problems and she proposed it to be included. We can see this in the next extract. Extract 6 Maria: …they are missing important problems like drugs traffic because affect (sic) all countries in the world and causes a lot of damage.. Maria makes an interesting point and she includes an issue that affects her country and the world. There is a reflection process that takes into account her own experiences and background as she mentions something that is not suggested in the article.. 35.

(36) With regard to this aspect, I want to clarify that students were not forced to reach those particular conclusions. Yet, they were pushed to analyze all the readings critically by using critical thinking reading strategies. They had the possibility to agree or not with the text, but they needed to justify their assumptions. This effort to reach conclusions that are not evident or explicit in a text is mentioned by Van Dijk (1997) who proposes a Critical Discourse Analysis. He said: ―Debería existir un esfuerzo para descubrir, revelar o divulgar aquello que está implícito o que está escondido ya que por algún motivo no es completamente obvio en las relaciones de dominación discursiva o ideológica‖ (Van Dijk, 1997, p. 17). Van Dijk strongly believes in ideological domination through discourse, and even though neither Giselle nor Maria mentioned this kind of domination explicitly, Giselle did take into consideration the political position of the United States in an environmental international agreement to support her opinion against the list of global problems proposed in the article. Evidently, if we consider the opinions of the students when they analyzed these two articles (McDonalds and Global Problems), we can observe a significant level of skepticism towards the positions presented in these two texts. That is to say, the fact students have followed specific steps of critical thinking (evaluating and inferring) made them contradict the position of the texts. Therefore, six out of eleven students did not agree with the position the text has against McDonalds and not all of them accepted a list of global problems proposed in another article. In fact students went beyond, as they stated that a very relevant global issue, problems with the environment, was not in the text because of the reasons explained previously. Yet, critical reading does not only mean to ―criticize‖ information. It also includes the capacity of connect what is in the readings to our own personal context. For instance, students were able to read information about strange drive thru services in the United States and they made connections to their own context when they needed to choose the best ideas among such services. These are two fragments of what they wrote about it. Extract 7. 36.

(37) Carolina: The best idea: the drive thru library because many people can get a book without leave (sic) the car… … in Colombia a lot of people is (sic) lazy and this service could improve the reading. Pedro: Wedding Chapel drive thru, in Las Vegas is (sic) good idea… …in Colombia is (sic) very bad idea because here we have strong believes (sic) and so it could be like a sin.. So, students evaluated the different services as they made relationships with their own context in Colombia. They related information they knew or presumed about Colombia (a lot of people in Colombia are lazy to read and we have strong beliefs about marriage) when expressing their opinions during the exercise. There is something interesting to consider though. It can be said that students already had critical thinking abilities when reading and that they have transferred this ability from their Spanish reading processes. This way, it is possible to argue that students are not responding to the pedagogical innovation, rather they are transferring abilities they learned when reading in their mother tongue. However, we can contrast the results of the first reading exercises of the intervention with the last ones. I would like to make reference to the first critical thinking reading exercise of the intervention. Students had to predict stereotypes they had about American people in order to compare those predictions with a list of actual American stereotypes taken from the Internet. Then, students needed to give their opinions about the stereotypes. I am going to show the first part of my field notes during that class to illustrate my findings. Extract 8 I told my students I had some stereotypes about Americans taken from the Internet… …there were many stereotypes that they predicted: (4 in total: Americans are stupid, Americans are fat, Americans love fast food and all Americans have a car). Indeed, most of these stereotypes have a negative connotation about Americans… …They were asked if this information was either true or not and they claimed that most of the stereotypes reflected true conditions of the American society. I asked them why? Pedro said that they could know how American people are because of movies and media and other students agreed with him.. 37.

(38) According to my vision as teacher-researcher, students were not very analytic at the first time they expressed their opinions about American Stereotypes. They just agreed with the information they read, but they did not evaluate or query the source of information. The main argument Pedro had was a reference to general information he got from the media. This is the main characteristic of a stereotype, which is a simplified conception of an idea or concept, a group of people in this case. However, let us remember that stereotypes are not frequently accurate and they emphasize negative aspects. As an example, Sander Gilman says that ―stereotypes are a crude set of mental representations of the world‖ (Gilman, 1997, p. 284). However, the next part of the exercise made students react in a different way. They were given a list of stereotypes foreigners have about Colombians, also taken from the Internet. As well as the American stereotypes, this information mostly had a lot of negative connotations about Colombians or it was just inaccurate (Colombians either consume or sell cocaine, Colombian men are chauvinist and sexist, Colombian men like to have a moustache, etc.). Therefore, students gave their opinions about Colombians stereotypes as well. The next part of the field notes will show evidence of the effect this material had on the students. Extract 9 …I showed my students the Colombian stereotypes. They were shocked and I asked them if they considered that Colombian people were that way. In most of the cases, they did not agree with the stereotypes… ...They got the conclusion that we usually have a double standard when we talk about our culture compared to other cultures. Kelly said: we like to criticize other people but we do not criticize ourselves. Giselle said: ―we criticize ourselves but we are much harder when we criticize other people‖.. In this case, the reaction was totally different because the students did not accept the stereotypes as they did before. Besides that, they started to deal with critical reading strategies since they needed to answer the next questions: is the information complete? Is it timely? Is it accurate? Is it reliable? Henceforth, students started to be aware of the importance of evaluating critically the information because during the following classes,. 38.

(39) they did not agree with the information presented in the texts before asking themselves the previous questions to evaluate the information of the texts. As a matter of fact, the second critical reading exercise was the one presented in extract 3, and students were much more critical with the texts. Finally, it is important to highlight the fact that at the end of the intervention the students said how important is for them to develop critical reading in their lives. Specifically, during the interviews they had the following perceptions of the process carried out in class. Extract 10 Giselle: pues yo creo que la lectura crítica es importante en todas las lecturas. Uno no debería leer nada sin tener lectura crítica, ni siquiera una novela porque no puede ver, o sea, ver lo que el autor piensa en cada texto y por lo tanto ver si te reflejas en eso y seguir esa línea de pensamiento o no seguirla. Carolina: pedirnos nuestra opinión es obligarnos a encontrar en nuestro conocimiento la forma de expresarnos correctamente sobre temas que generalmente no nos han pedido que nos expresemos. Expresarnos sobre democracia, sobre política sobre ecoturismo en nuestras propias palabras de un momento a otro, no es algo que generalmente se nos pida. María: claro porque hace como pensar y analizar, tomar como opiniones acerca de eso y lo hace como aun más investigar, querer investigar sobre eso. Armando: …eso le genera a uno opiniones. Le crea a uno argumentos con que soportar las opiniones que uno tiene y pues es cultura general y es cosas que uno sabe y uno sabe defenderse en cierto tipo de temas. Si tienen razón y si tienen justificaciones para ese tipo de cosas.. To sum up the process and these final perceptions, during the intervention students were pushed to apply different strategies of critical thinking during reading. Then, the participants declared something in common. Giselle mentioned that the intervention made her evaluate texts carefully before deciding if the arguments presented in a reading are valid; Carolina said that the reading exercises made her give critical opinions about topics they normally do not analyze; María admitted that the intervention generated the wish to investigate more about the topics; Armando stated that the process helped him create. 39.