CRITICAL LITERACY
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Since the famous (Freire P., 1970) a Brazilian educator-expatriate, wrote with energy transformed from the awareness of a third-world consciousness in his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his theoretical contributions had been influential in the development of new social-change theories. Then he started talking about critical literacy. In practice we can see this fundamental in the following way: In functional literacy, talk about the names of the authors, on the contrary in critical literacy we analyze the author: time of writing, chronology, ideologies, thoughts, issues, way of writing, perceptions, hidden messages, influences, etc. A teacher must go beyond a problematize students brains for them to be critical, search for solutions and establish what they are going to do to solve it. The teacher cannot keep the skills only.
DIMENSIONS OF CRITICAL LITERACY
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1. Problematizing: What do my students think about something? It is not just code and decodes, it is analyzing. It is asking why?
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2. Interrogating Multiple Points. Teachers must pay attention to our student`s voices.
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3. Focusing on the sociopolitical. It is constructed to achieve certain agendas (What the author proposes)
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4. Taking action an promoting social justice. A vehicle for combating injustice and political engagement. We must see the world through different lenses.
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The schoolar (Vasquez, 2017) has stated that literacies are in every single person and it is not only for language. She also stated that critical Literacy allows us to redesign the world, think about its reconstruction of images, texts, transmission of messages, ways of being disruptive, reflective, changing, thoughtful, analytical, critical, from the social point of view to impact and change the world effectively. Example: If we criticize the text message of a water bottle to create awareness in all people who read it in the construction of a better world. In this way critical literacy contributes to the elaboration of new outputs in texts, images and practices.How people interact with reading and writing the world, how people rewrite the world and enrich it with new ideas about the same content or definition according to (Gomez & Zuluaga, 2014). (Healey, 2014) Said that literacy teaching and learning acrocc classrooms are changing. As teachnology allows for the exponential accesibility and production of multimodal texts, it is important to implement literacy curriculum and pedagogy that allows the successful growth and development of students´ multiliteracies skills
The evolution of literacy brought two new terms: Multimodality and multiliteracies.
MULTIMODALITY
The term multimodality has existed with us since ancient times, and it shows how our students have different ways of expressing themselves beyond language with the use types of communication, as such: Their postures, their movements, their visual presentations as drawings, images, their way of looking, the tone of their voice, audio representations, written language, among others any type of form they use for the same purpose. (Mattewman, 2004). Here I have some examples of Multimodality:
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Multimodal Texts:
They are those texts that have images, texts that have graphics or tables to be analyzed, texts with photographs, texts with audio, they are texts that attract the attention of the students because of their different fonts, their sizes, or because they are colorful. They can be found via the Internet, in interactive texts or advertisements. Because they have many modes of delivery, they are called multimodal. They combine linguistic resources and semiotic systems to reinforce a message or to make it known. For years we have considered the text to be everything that is written, but writing is no longer what represents the most in learning materials, specifically textbooks, web-resources, materials produced by the teacher. (Kress & Bezemer, 2008).
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Multimodal Stories: (Storytelling)
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Telling a story is a form of human communication and it is been promoted for entertainment social and cultural connection to preserve knowledge, values, paradigms, beliefs in society. In summary, it has been an oral tradition. (Rozende, 2016). In 2006, (Butcher, 2006) The use of storytelling in the classroom help students to use gestures, vocalization, imagination, creativity and conceives living experience and teachable moments; developing empathy for themselves and others. This whole way of applying storytelling on each day practice broaden and challenge critical thinking and self-reflection, among students. Encouraging storytelling in school students and adults is beneficial for both, especially because it designs a lively atmosphere. Students enjoy the possibility to share stories, they express their feelings and the exchange of personal stories is inestimable, as it allows each learner to gradually lose the tension and the anxiety to speak. (Fitzgibbon & Wildhem, 1998). Storytelling encourages in adults empowers students to interact with each other, advocating collective synergy and teamwork, using narrative as a methodology for EFL learners is a crucial didactic mechanism in achieving improvement of specific sets of language abilities and comprehensible input. Enhancing in this way, the acquisition of the second language (Ripung, 2010).
