Machine summary:
"From this perspective, literacy is understood as social action through language use that develops us as agents inside a larger culture, while critical literacy is understood as learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations (Blackledge, 2000; Anderson & Irvine, 1993).
Throughout the course, a number of strategies were highlighted in the experimental group which included: immersion, prediction, deconstruction, reconstruction, and taking social actions – elaborated in Table 1 below: 150 Table 1 – The skills and strategies instructed during the course • Explaining critical thinking • Discussing ways of reading a text Immersion • Providing some questions to make the students think critically • Working on the topic • Focusing on the story ‘constructedness’ Prediction • Concerning the text relationship to other texts (intertextuality) • Linking the ideas • Analyzing how readings are constructed or produced • Reading other interpretations • Considering what is at stake in the disagreement between readings • Deconstruction Making invisible the gaps and silences of texts and readings • Analyzing what readings support in terms of the values they affirm • Challenging other especially ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ readings • Understanding that meaning is not simply in the Reconstruction text • Introducing their own new way of interpreting • Criticizing the ideological partisanship in a text • Criticizing any perspectives which the story expected readers to share Taking social action • Asking where different interpretations of a text could come from • Thinking about society influences As described earlier, the posttests and the reading interview were conducted at the end of the treatment."