Exploring Critical Literacy Practices in Teaching Reading among Grade 10 ESL Filipino Teachers

Abstract

This study investigated: (1) the critical literacy practices prevalently used by the Grade 10 ESL teachers; (2) their beliefs about reading instruction, the learners, and critical literacy; and (3) the extent of use of critical literacy in their lesson plan. To gain better understanding of the problem, a descriptive method under the mixed-method approach was applied. Specifically, an explanatory-sequential method was utilized wherein the first phase of data gathering procedure was quantitative followed by the qualitative data collection. In this vein, data triangulation was performed as well to achieve reliability and validity of the results. Hence, aside from the survey and interview questionnaires as research instruments, lesson plan content analysis was also used to solidify the results of the study. The findings of the study disclosed that critical literacy practices like problem-posing, promoting social justice, and counter-text production were prevalently used. However, due to low-level language proficiency among students, lack of resources, and discreet-point system of testing, they tended to de-emphasize critical literacy in their reading classroom. In fact, the results of the lesson plan content analysis evidenced that they applied critical literacy like promoting social justice however, they confirmed that sometimes critical literacy was not carried out due to the factors stated above. Through this, the results in the first two phases of the study were triangulated.