Gains and Challenges Experienced by Undergraduate Students During the Implemention of a Critical Reading Unit at a Public University in Medellín, Colombia

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Nowadays, students are abundantly exposed to different discourses through texts such as memes, magazine articles, and newspaper reports. Although these texts seem to be neutral, the language in them is used not only to transmit information but also to produce social undesired phenomena. This is why it is important to teach students to read these texts critically which means: identifying authors’ position and how it influences readers, thinking about texts from multiple perspectives, unveiling hidden messages, and identifying silenced and marginalized voices. Students reading this way are less prone to authors’ influence. On the contrary, students not reading this way, fall prey to authors’ manipulation easily. In the case of Colombia, universities have offered English reading comprehension courses. Unfortunately, the most prominent Colombian EFL journals show these courses mostly focus on the study skills model in which students learn cognitive reading strategies, grammar, and vocabulary. Thus, students are deprived of reading critically as described above. Given the lack of examples on how to do critical reading of community texts with undergraduate students in Colombia and the lack of knowledge on the gains and challenges this could bring, this study aimed to explore the gains and challenges experienced by a group of undergraduate students during the implementation of a critical reading unit within a reading comprehension course at a public university in Medellín, Colombia. The research question was: what are the gains and challenges experienced by undergraduate students during the implementation of a critical reading unit? To answer this, an intrinsic case study was done and data sources such as video-recordings of all lessons, samples of students’ work, and students’ reflections were collected and analysed in a deductive-inductive way. Results from this analysis suggest that students experienced particular gains and challenges during the critical reading unit. Finally, the study also has some implications for teaching and research. The former includes the need to provide students with proper scaffolding to carry out the activities among others. The later include discovering how this methodology would work in other settings and with other students who are exposed to other types of texts.