Critical Literacy is a form of learning in which students are expected to explore a variety of texts to understand the relationship between language and the ability to grasp. Students analyze the meaning of texts as they relate to topics related to equality, power and social justice.
Critical education refers to the process of knowing one’s personal information about power relations, which is often achieved through literacy. Critical reading and writing takes place in a variety of learning and cultural contexts. This literacy process encourages students to accept, reject or reconstruct ideas presented in texts.
Why is critical literacy important?
- We need critical literacy because it helps us to: create a balanced atmosphere in the reader-writer relationship; understanding the writer’s enthusiasm for writing and how the author uses the text to make us understand in a certain way; understanding that the author’s point of view is not the only opinion; and become active users of the knowledge of the text in order to develop their own ideas, as opposed to being mere producers of ideas in the text.
- Essential reading helps us to read texts in deeper, more meaningful ways, by encouraging readers of all ages to actively engage and use their strengths to build understanding and can be used by text to achieve the author’s goals.
- Critical teaching allows students to work hard on learning and problem solving, by providing space, source of action or social justice.
- Critical teaching allows students to better connect classroom practice with the community they meet outside of school, providing communication between home, school, and community.
- Practicing critical writing involves students and allows them to apply their past experiences, providing classroom texts that are very similar to those used outside the classroom.
Examples of Critical Literacy
- Phonics awareness (sound recognition) is the ability to hear and play with each sound of language, to form new words using those sounds in different ways. This often happens in the natural course of a child’s development. A phoneme is the smallest sound category in spoken language.
As your child begins to play with the word pieces, it indicates that they have some awareness of sounds.
- Print awareness
Parents can encourage print awareness by exposing children to books and other readings material at an early age. Many prints awareness starts at home with the child’s everyday environment.
Children also take a note of natural print of such words which are found on road signs, in grain boxes, and so on.
- Vocabulary
Children who learn to read (and most people) have two types of words, which is a collection of all the words that a person knows and uses in a conversation.
Functional vocabulary includes the words a person often uses in speech and writing. Words in a working vocabulary are those that one can define and use in context. Vocabulary words that do not belong to someone who knows, but the meaning may have been translated by context and used by others.
- Spelling words
Spelling is defined as the arrangement of letters to form a word. The spelling and grammar after the unfamiliar spelling help children to learn to read beforehand
- Learning to understand
If a child can read and understand the meaning of something he or she is reading, he or she is said to have an understanding of reading. In addition to reading words, reading comprehension includes the ability to draw pointers and identify patterns and clues in the text.