Reading Gendered Media Texts Critically: Challenges and Posibilities of Using CLA Principles in an EFL Class

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Learning a foreign language goes far beyond becoming a proficient user of some grammatical structures and vocabulary. It should serve a greater purpose: One that expands learners’ horizons, and as Paulo Freire (1970) suggests, enables them to read the world through language. Critical Language Awareness (CLA) is an approach that can help them fulfill this purpose. The present study explored the challenges and possibilities of incorporating CLA principles to foster a critical reading of gendered media texts in an EFL course. Data included video-recorded sessions during scaffolding activities with learners, students’ responses to CLA-based materials designed by the teacher, a teachers’ journal, and a final questionnaire. Results from the study suggest that despite students’ difficulty to cope with language in some media texts, CLA activities helped them to not only enhance oral communication, but also develop skills to identify gendered discourses in media texts and question the ways these positioned them as readers. Data also evidenced that fostering CLA in a FL classroom requires teachers’ self-awareness of what a critical reading of texts implies, not only as to how these principles could be fostered by means of different class activities, but in terms of one’s own understanding of personal biases when confronted with issues such as race, gender, age, and social status. Such understanding could also lead to a better informed selection of texts and materials for the tasks to be carried out in the sense that they would accomplish the purpose of helping students with the bettering of their communicative skills while raising awareness of non-neutral nature of texts.