CRITICAL LITERACY AND FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR: TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

Knowledge Deepening / Consolidation

Students are expected to: • appreciate the dialectical relationship between language use and society, i.e. understand the way language works as a social practice, • be ale to read texts as ideological resources, • be able to identify, through the SFL paradigm, the way by which lexicogrammatical means and multimodal resources may be used by writers in the process of signaling specific positions and stances that privilege certain discourses rather than others. • be able to design and implement a thematic unit instantiating the premises of the critical literacy paradigm, • be able to reflect upon classroom culture and read the way a dialogic literate culture may be created through their choice of texts and pedagogical practices.

Τhis course discusses the basic premises that constitute the critical literacy paradigm, that has been recently developed in the language teaching and literacy learning literature, and illustrates the way these premises may be used in Greek classroom communities, redefining aspects of language use, patterns of meaning making as well as teaching and learning practices. Moving away from the prevailing view of language, which is traditionally seen as a neutral resource that mirrors a preexisting reality, and from pedagogical approaches prevailing in the Greek context, and which foster the static implementation of (usually isolated from each other) reading and writing activities, the course, through the critical literacy paradigm and the Systemic Functional Grammar, as developed by Halliday and Martin, aims to enrich students’ understanding of language as an ideological resource. The course has a twofold aim, a theoretical and a pedagogical one. On the theoretical front, it aims to develop students’ understanding of the ideological nature of language use and sharpen their understanding of texts, seen as indexes to wider social discourses. The discussion aims to help students appreciate the way by which language, working along with image and other semiotic tools, is instrumental for constructing specific Discourses, for privileging certain representations of the world (while excluding others) as well as for projecting specific literate as well as social identities. On the practical level, the course offers students with the necessary tools through which they may critically reflect upon the specifics of classroom life and appreciate the way pedagogical practices – concerning both the texts used as well as the reading and writing processes designed - work to constitute certain meanings rather than other, to index certain literate and social identities, to privilege certain representations of language use, teaching and learning as more versus less valid. Students visit a classroom community in which they are required, by applying these tools, to delineate the culture of the classroom community as created through the texts selected and the pedagogical practices designed. In addition, students are asked to design a thematic unit that instantiates the critical literacy pedagogy and implement it in the classroom community they attend. In short, by reflecting upon their own reading and writing activities as contexts shaping one another and existing in a dialectical relationship to society, this course aims to offer students with much-needed metalanguage through which they may read their own practices and appreciate the way these contribute to the construction of “effective” classroom communities. Critical literacy pedagogy, SFL grammar, dominant discourses, dialogic communities, heteroglossia, texts as indexes of ideological meanings, reading and writing as social practices. Παιδαγωγική του κριτικού γραμματισμού, συστημική λειτουργική γραμματική, ηγεμονικοί Λόγοι, διαλογικές κοινότητες, ετερογλωσσία, κείμενα ως ιδεολογικές δομές, ανάγνωση και γραφή ως κοινωνικές πρακτικές.

Critical literacy pedagogy, SFL grammar, dominant discourses, dialogic communities, heteroglossia, texts as indexes of ideological meanings, reading and writing as social practices.

04-06-2021