CRITICAL LITERACY: RECOVERING THE HIDDEN POWER INSIDE

A fundamental goal of critical literacy approach is to bring a change and empower students as critical thinkers and subjects of decision. As courses unfold, the students are expected to do more than simply accumulate information; they are supposed to develop critical thinking, challenge their previous ‘taken for granted’ belief structures, transform themselves and change their immediate social environment. In this article, we present the details of a qualitative enquiry in university reading comprehension courses with the help of critical literacy approaches (Freire, 1991) and community literacy language approaches (Heath, 1985, Street, 1982). We try to investigate how learners reflected on their individual/community and word/world concerns through critical understanding of texts and how they challenged and shattered their ‘taken for granted’ beliefs and transformed into critical/analytical thinkers and people of voice and position. The data consists of 400 webbings and personal journal writings by fifty undergraduate English literature students at Al-Zahra University, as well as oral and written interviews. The data was qualitatively analyzed in search of themes that could illustrate students' early thinking structures and their empowerment and transformations into subjects of decisions. The study revealed that, through webbing words/worlds and critically challenging texts, students take the opportunity to approach the knowledge and information presented to them analytically and critically. On this basis, we discuss how students were able to gain the power of critiquing, freeing their thoughts, finding and expressing their voice and position, discovering personal meaning in contexts, cooperating participation, and understanding learning for meaning through the act of reading in our context of language and literacy education.