Does implementing critical literacy have to conflict with EAP reading curriculum?

Woomi Shin, Second Language Studies

Aligning myself with Canagarajah (2002), Benesch (2001) and Wallace (1992, 2001, 2003), I argue that it would be meaningful to consider ways to implement critical literacy in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom. While acknowledging the focus of EAP as being responsive to context, Benesch (2001) points out EAP grounds itself in pragmatism and characterizes its curriculum primarily as study skills and strategy based. Not surprisingly, the general EAP reading curriculum and textbooks have mainly adopted a traditional notion of reading process, which Wallace (2003) describes as “characterized as psychological, cognitive and individual.” These are the two views which the presenter seeks to challenge and find ways to deal with in a more critical and reflexive way. The presenter developed four different materials in collaboration with students through such principles of critical literacy instruction as (1) problematizing classroom and public texts, (2) encouraging students to make contributions to meaning making, (3) integrating reading and writing for academic literacy. Two types of data were collected: (a) students’ response papers to the readings and (b) recordings of conferences between the teacher and students. The present study is an attempt to 1) to show in what ways the ELI reading courses can open up a third space for students where they can get engaged in self-reflexive and socially grounded practices in improving their textual, rhetorical, and discursive understanding of various reading materials, 2) to examine how students respond to materials based on literacy as a social practice piloted in class.