Grade 5 EFL Learners’ Critical Design of Multimodal Texts: The Problematic of Smooth Transitioning between Mainstream Literacy and Critical Literacy Instruction
This case study examined how an EFL grade 5 teacher enabled her learners in a public school in Mount Lebanon to read with and against the text. Using a critical literacy model as the analysis tool, the authors interpreted how instruction designed in accordance with Ibrahim’s (2022) CALT model may help learners transition smoothly among accessing texts, deconstructing texts and reconstructing them in more equitable ways. To this end, the authors analyzed the design of a CALT lesson around a text titled “At the Supermarket”. They also examined the factors that may affect the learners’ imagining of more equitable trade through an advertisement they designed at the end of the lesson. The Lesson and the 8 advertisements designed by four girls and four boys, which constituted the data in this report, were taken from a larger, one-year study in which the teacher implemented critical literacy in a grade 5 class. In the present report, our goal was to explore whether the interconnectedness among the different reading modes or families of practices may be pedagogically realized through CALT and whether the CALT-based lesson around a text titled “At the Supermarket” may enable young learners to smoothly navigate among decoding and understanding texts, deconstructing these texts and reconstructing them critically. The analysis revealed that the eight students brought their creativity and their language resources to design their ads, but only a few constructed the supermarket as a place for fair trade, as demonstrated by the following groupings of the learners’ work: Alternative representation ads, reproduction of the neoliberal marketing ads, and reproduction of the school genre ads. The data indicated that the learners’ enactment of the design/redesign task may be affected by the interaction of the different facets of their engagement, by the type of texts and experiences they have built on, and by their desires.
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