Abstract:

Mastering a foreign language is a must in today society and hence the institutional efforts made at improving our students’ linguistic competences at all education levels. If university students are future language teachers, teacher trainers ineludibly need to help trainees to become both fully competent users of the target language and reflective teachers. Parallel to this, the fact that at many primary and secondary schools English is becoming the language through which young learners have access to non-linguistic contents, trainees need to master the language they will use as a tool for instruction but also to be able to apply pedagogical proposals for cross disciplinary teaching and learning. We depart from these premises and focus on the development of our students’ critical reading skills as a means to help them improve their mastery of the target language and their ability to reflect upon non-linguistic contents. Therefore, we base our study on how to work with texts at university level on two solid pillars: on the one hand, the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodology and on the other, critical literacy studies (Abdullah, 1994, Cassany, 2006 and Serafini, 2003).

The present article is part of the work carried out in our 2007-2009 Teaching Quality Improvement project (MQD) entitled “Teaching strategies to develop critical linguistic competences for Teacher’s Training in Foreign Language Degree through English subjects” . One of the objectives of this project, thus, is to design and put into practice teaching strategies to improve the English level of our future foreign language teachers and, more precisely, we aim at analysing a series of guidelines to train/coach our students in terms of critical reading of different text types (e.g. literary, scientific, educational and journalistic). The investigation presented in this paper aims at a) describing our students’ critical literacy competence when reading texts from different sources and b) collecting evidence for the establishment of a relationship between students’ competences of English and critical reading.

In this paper, we will explain the preliminary results of the several experiences carried out by our group from a cross disciplinary perspective. Secondly, we will focus on the analysis of the available data (both qualitative and quantitative) and, especially, on the statistic study of the possible correlation of our university students English language level and their critical reading competence in English. Even though our results seem to be quite promising and positive they may indicate a long process left, too. In other words, there is a lot of work to be done concerning the homogeneous implementation of teaching strategies on specific reading and, above all, facilitating our students to position themselves and think critically.

Keywords:

didactic strategies, critical reading competence, teachers training, clil.