چکیده:
Despite a fairly long emergence of critical approaches to language teaching, there still seems to be a dearth of practitioner inquiries narrating experiences of implementing Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in English as Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Prompted, the present study narrates the measures taken by an Iranian language teacher for encouraging learners to analyze and examine language deployment in the world around them. The participants of this semester-long study were a community of twenty young female students studying English Literature at a state university in Tehran, Iran who were engaged in a series of reading events including reflective reading of advertisements and TV commercials, and critical analysis of literary works, news and journalistic writings, inter alia. The analysis of classroom records plus reflective journals written by the students display the ways through which the students practiced standing back from texts, questioning the biased ideas, developing reasoned position, and responding in their own voices.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Advocates of CLA, while acknowledging its indebtedness to Language Awareness (LA) and borrowing theoretical and methodological perspectives from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Ali, 2011; Alim, 2010; Bolitho, Carter, Hughes, Ivanic, Masuhara, & Tomlison, 2003; Wallace, 1992), extend its purview beyond a narrow linguistics enterprise chiefly associated with lexical and grammatical knowledge, and pay heightened attention to the socio- economic and political nature of language and its effects on our everyday life (Males, 2000; Taylor, Despagne, & Faez, 2018).
Ghahremani-Ghajara and Kafshgarsouteh (2011), partially adopting Freirian critical literacy approach, also explored the ways a community of English-major language learners developed critical understanding of texts through being engaged with several courses of action including webbing (finding the relevance and importance of the texts to their personal life, reading the worlds behind the words of the texts, and taking a critical position towards the hidden ideology, meanings, and values by designing creative shapes); blogging (showing involvement with the texts by writing comments in the margins, talking to the writer of the texts, posing questions and challenging the authorial stance); and sharing written dialogic journals with their teacher.
Wherefore, I kept reflecting on my quarter-long experience of teaching English in institutes and academes; consulted existing literature and conducted studies on critical language awareness; and devoted a lot of time planning the classroom practices and selecting or preparing materials (reading texts, video clips, question sets) which could serve the purpose.