Critical Reading Practice for EFL Readers

Critical Reading Practice for EFL Readers

The goal of this study is to investigate EFL readers’ use of critical reading when they read texts. Focusing only on understanding the propositional meaning of a text influences the pedagogy of EFL in that students accept textual knowledge via the teacher as the authorized version of truth and what counts as knowledge so that they are also brainwashed by the ideology of these texts; all texts include a certain ideology because language is not neutral. However, there is also a presupposition that critical reading is merely an additional level tacked onto mainstream literacy education and mainstream discourse analysis. Critical reading practice in this study is an adaptation of Fairclough’s (1995) critical discourse analysis in which issues of power and control are central to the social theories he builds. This empirical study investigated Korean EFL university students’ use of critical reading enhanced by a qualitative method of data analysis. One of the findings is that the participants were aware that language reflects unequal social power that operates within institutions and discourses. There will be further discussion of other findings and suggestions for EFL reading pedagogy.