Reading “Further and Beyond the Text”: Student Perspectives of Critical Literacy in EFL Reading and Writing

Critical literacy is widely practiced in classrooms in many countries and across levels of education. Research that explores critical literacy in English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms, however, remains scarce. The few studies that do exist focus on development of critical literacy without explicit attention to development of language skills (see, e.g., Burns & Hood, 1998a; Kuo, 2009; Wallace, 2003). These studies also do not systematically examine students’ understanding of critical literacy in relation to their language development. Merely exploring the potential of critical literacy implementation from the instructor’s perspective is not enough to provide a holistic picture of its implications for ESL and EFL learning. Therefore, in this article I explore how critical literacy and conventional literacy can be simultaneously promoted in an EFL reading and writing course. I also examine students’ perspectives of critical literacy in relation to language development, discussing specifically what critical literacy means to them, how critical literacy helps their reading and writing, and how their EFL literacy improved as a result of the course.