Critical literacy

Critical Literacy is a feature of literary inquiry and involves supporting learners to look for the underlying agenda, to understand social conventions regarding genres and registers, and cultural perspectives. Teachers of LOTE can access a range of authentic materials to provide a context for this mode of inquiry.

Intercultural Language Learning is an emerging pedagogy that has strong connections to inquiry thinking, requiring learners to adopt an inquiring state of mind, to notice and question assumptions and to reorient themselves in relation to others. A critical dimension of understanding language in use, is that language cannot be separated from its social and cultural contexts. In recent years there has been a shift in focus from a static view of culture, learning isolated facts, to a dynamic view enabling the learner to understand about self and develop skills for ongoing learning.

To become an effective learner in this context, students must develop a variety of learning strategies from reflective observation to active experimentation.

Common features of intercultural language teaching are:

• exploration by the learners of the target language and culture and of their own language and culture;
• discovery of the relationship between language and culture;
• developing conceptual and analytic tools for comparing and understanding cultures;
• developing a reflective capacity to deal with cultural difference and to modify behaviour where needed.

Pedagogy for intercultural language learning

• drawing out, through interactive talk, questioning, scaffolding, and providing feedback, the implicit conceptions and the explanatory systems of learners that shape how they interpret what they learn, and how they see themselves.
• drawing upon resources that provide a window on interculturality.
• attending to the longitudinal progress of learners, constantly building, extending, elaborating on concepts and processes in relation to intercultural language learning.
• creating a culture of inquiry and reflection in the classroom.
• developing intercultural sensitivity.

Scenarios

Students could explore a range of text genres in the target language that embed cultural information and provide opportunities for exploration of and insights about language and culture. Suitable resources may need scaffolding to allow for access to unfamiliar language in authentic texts and some English will be required for in depth discussion of concepts.

Authentic texts such as videos, films, survey results, reviews, advertisements, cartoons etc can provide a wealth of cultural information for exploration. Learners need to be supported to notice differences between the new input and their own culture and have the opportunity to think about, explore and discuss their findings