Using News Articles to Build a Critical Literacy Classroom in an EFL Setting

This article examines an effort to support critical literacy in an English as a foreign language (EFL) setting by analyzing one college EFL reading classroom in which students read and responded to articles from The New Yorker. Data include transcribed audiotapes of classroom interaction and interviews with students, classroom materials, and response papers to the focal news article. Using these data, the research identifies (a) how critical literacy was employed in the EFL classroom, (b) students' critical engagement with the text through interaction and writing, and (c) benefits and challenges of employing critical literacy in an EFL setting. Results show that when taught to be critical readers of the text, these EFL participants were able to actively use linguistic resources from the article as well as their own cultural and personal experience to support their ideas and raise questions. Contrary to previous notions that language learners tend to be passive readers of information, the students in the current study actively voiced their opinions through discussion and response papers. The study suggests that newspaper and magazine articles can be important pedagogical tools for promoting critical thinking in the EFL reading classroom. Several challenges and limitations are discussed.