Most teaching pedagogies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes prioritize linguistic skills development over exploring how cultural factors shape language interpretation. To address the gap, this study developed and evaluated an instructional design project using the attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction (ARCS) motivational…

Purpose: This paper aims to propose a critical multimodal framework to understanding pedagogical materials that focuses on not only the verbal or the visual components but also the interaction between the two semiotic resources that constructs power relations as a result of intermodal interaction, and it further provides an example of an in-depth…

The effects of social annotation on critical literacy remain controversial, and little research has explained why some students can benefit from social annotation in critical literacy, and some cannot. This chapter investigates the effects of social annotation on critical literacy and the interactive patterns of social annotations. The…

With the commodification of English education in East Asian societies, a robust advertising industry has arisen to attract consumers. In the project described here, I engaged in a critical content analysis of over 1000 advertisements for English educational products and services collected in Japan and Taiwan. My focus was on how social groups are…

This article presents findings from the global literacy project, Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling (MDST), which provides a means of nurturing and reflecting multiliteracies in practice. It recognises the power of storytelling and the space stories offer both for self-representation and for engaging with otherness. It draws…

This study explores the relevance of multimodality to critical media literacy. It is based on the understanding that communication is intrinsically multimodal and multimodal communication is inherently social and ideological. By analysing two English-language learners' multimodal ensembles, the study reports on how multimodality contributes to a…

This study analyzes a critical literacy activity that had 33 non-English-major college freshmen in Taiwan consider who they are. Students were exposed to four self-discovery texts (i.e., texts that can motivate students to reflect on the various roles they play in society) as well as to follow-up assignments and classroom discussions. Grounded…

This study explores an activity designed to promote critical literacy in Taiwan. This activity had 23 college students perform different exercises all stressing the theme of self-identity as presented in a picture book and other learning sources. Data included classroom observations, reflection entries from the researcher­-instructor, classroom…

This qualitative case study explored four English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners' critical literacy practices by analyzing their reflective essays on a gender-related article and their perceptions of critical literacy. Four participants with varying English proficiency were purposefully selected from a critical literacy-oriented reading…

This paper reports a follow-up study that explored the relationship between EFL learners' critical literacy practices and the English language proficiency. It investigated four focal EFL learners' critical literacy practices in their dialogic interaction and also analyzed 39 students' views on their critical literacy learning. The four focal…

This qualitative case study describes in detail a college teacher's experience in teaching critical literacy to English major students in Taiwan. A qualitative analysis of the data collected from classroom observation, class discussion and interviews shows that the teacher struck a balance between language skills teaching and critical literacy…

Despite the increasing recognition of the need for critical perspectives in teaching English to speakers of other languages, critical literacy remains very much a marginalised practice. The implementation of critical literacy is still limited in English-as-a-second-language classrooms and is almost non-existent in English-as-a-foreign-language…