Critical Literacy and Semiotic Juxtaposition: The Possibilities of Multimodal Pedagogy in Korea

The various explanations and definitions of critical literacy share key characteristics with Peirce’s semiotic theory regarding the ideological nature of texts, readers, and interpretive practices. This article locates critical literacy in the semiotic juxtaposition of signs, and uses Pierce’s (Freadman, 2004) classification of signs as icons, indexes, or symbols, as a semiotic framework to analyze two multimodal literacy events as critical practice. Teachers and researchers can use this semiotic framework to identify, qualify, and design multimodal texts and interpretive events that contribute to critical literacy practices. Through an analysis of critical literacy, semiotic theory, and multimodal project examples from two American middle school classrooms, this paper seeks to illustrate how such pedagogies may enhance the teaching practices of language teachers, including Korean EFL teachers, in ways that will increase students’ critical thinking skills and better understand how they are being ideologically positioned by representational meanings in all forms of textuality. In addition, it will be shown how such pedagogies may enhance students’ social agency as well as benefit their society. The purpose of this paper is not only to discuss these issues, but also to illustrate why the theories and pedagogies discussed should be included in Korean English teacher education.