Cultivating critical consciousness of struggling readers in a culturally diverse EFL context

This study aims to cultivate EFL students’ critical consciousness through critical dialogue-oriented reading instruction and to investigate students’ self-evaluation on critical consciousness. The framework of this study derived from 4 models; Dialogic model (Rungwaraphong, 2019), Critical Literacy model (Lewison et al., 2015), Critical consciousness assessment (Schneider, 2019), and Critical Dialogue (Shor & Freire, 1987). The study combined a mixed method design with action research concept and carried out for 16 weeks which covered the entire 2nd semester of academic year 2021. The participants were 30 students majoring in English and enrolled in a Fundamental Reading and Writing course, 7 of them participated in the interview session at the end of the study. The instruments implemented in this study were divided into 2 categories. Quantitative instrument was a questionnaire designed with a 5-likert rating scale and reading comprehension test. Qualitative instruments included open-ended parts from questionnaires, observation field note, interview transcripts, and students’ reflective journals.The findings were drawn out into 3 points as follows. First, student reading ability was enhanced from reading comprehension to reading with critical perspectives. The reading ability was congruent to Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson, Krathwohl & Bloom, 2001). The participants performed reading comprehension through the comprehension worksheets and the activities which mainly assess their learning outcomes in terms of remembering and understanding. Also, the participants were able to reach the higher-order thinking levels since they achieved the ability to implement the ideas from the texts to the relevant areas as well as raising problems found in the reading texts and produced the meanings from their own perspectives. These abilities are consistent with the learning outcomes in aspects of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The engagement between students’ and critical literacy supported students to read the texts beyond the linguistic level. Second, the critical consciousness was cultivated through the critical dialogue-oriented reading instruction. The cultivation occurred in forms of the awareness to social relation and power, the reflection on ongoing circumstances and living conditions, and the action against injustice. By the critical literacy framework, the students were encouraged to tackle injustice by accounting their local and cultural issues to combine with the text discussion and they arrived at the stage of being able to transform the injustice situations into more just ones. Third, the students held positive attitudes towards critical dialogue-oriented reading instruction. The horizontal, democratic, and supportive classroom allowed students to freely express their cultural identities and ideas when interacting with reading texts. The implications suggest the contributions of the model in this study to implement in classrooms of students with diversity in order to foster them to be critically aware learners who learn language with critical perspectives.