What Is Critical Literacy - Essay Example

Critical literacy is important as it moves readers beyond traditional view point about reading literature for the sake of reading the words but also to read the world. Coming up with questions about people whose voices have been represented or missing in the text, who gains or losses because of reading the text, assists the reader comprehend the text’s objectives and protect readers from being manipulated by the text itself (Joseph, 1985). Critical literacy support readers to analyze texts actively and offer strategies for uncovering underlying information.

There are many different perspectives about critical literacy which have produced various pedagogical approaches about learning and teaching. All these approaches have a common basic ground that literacy needs literate users of texts to implement a critical questioning approach (Edward, 2006). Proponents of critical literacy suggest that the practice is not just a way of achieving literacy by improving one’s ability to decode texts but is the ability to have a dialogue with others about the various meanings information might have and taking through a potentially critical learner how to think flexibly.

Literacy development has encouraged students to interrogate issues of power, for example the disparities in a social context for instance socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation, class, race etc. Students have become critically literate because they have the ability to critique messages that are in the texts that they read. Fundamentally, instructors who use critical pedagogy show how to examine the language and how it plays a role in the social construction. This therefore implies that critically literate students evaluate ongoing development, the role they play on the earth and how experiences make sense to them.

There are many ways of involving students to become critical members