Encouraging students to develop critical literacies through local issue articles

Abstract

The role of reading and writing has become a cornerstone to access information not only from the mere linguistic codes from the readings but the interpretation and meaning students could provide to those texts. This descriptive and exploratory qualitative research focused on the analysis of teenagers’ opinions and insights of critical reading from internet newspaper articles and how this critical reading was developed in the English classroom with students of 11th grade. These data were collected through the use of teachers’ field notes, audio recordings and students’ written artifacts. Additionally, the findings showed that students were engaged in reading of local issues nature. The students created an inter-textual environment as well as students relied on multimodal sources remarking the use of technology for accessing information as key for enlarging knowledge; as a result, transcending the literal and interpretive levels of reading and reaching a critical stance in it.