Founding members - July 2006 - CL winter school after the
10th BRAZ-TESOL National Convention in Brasilia

At the October 2009 Southern Cone Tesol
Convention “Critical Thinking for Critical Times” in Santiago de Chile
Nella de la Fuente with Plenary speaker Lydia Stack

The Critical Literacy in ELT Project

Critical Literacy in ELT

The three overall aims of the CL in ELT Project are:
• to build/expand knowledge and understanding of the implications of critical literacy in ELT;
• to develop a framework for material development within this strand (classroom materials/teacher education/online content);
• to develop a strategy for research and dissemination related to the notion of critical literacy in teacher education and within teacher networks.
 
Critical Literacy:

• can be seen as a perspective on language which perceives it as a cultural construct;
• proposes the analysis of the relationships among texts, language, power and society;
• leads us to question texts - written, visual or oral - to assess the assumptions, values and beliefs that inform textual production;
• is an analysis of how discourse is constructed and how it is read;
• encourages us to deconstruct texts to consider what determined their structure, style and language, enabling us to examine their underlying values;
• invites us to analyse our own readings of such texts and realise that they are also influenced by contextual factors.  
Above all, Critical Literacy brings about a change in our assumptions and perceptions of our own role as language teachers as it becomes part of our responsibility as educators to empower learners to think independently to make informed and responsible decisions about how to read and what to do with the content of the texts that are brought into the classroom.

Get engaged.

Plans are already being made to run the project for a third year. For news, articles, reports, links and downloads, please check the Spotlight section on the BC ELT Online Community at www.britishcouncil.org.br/elt
To engage in the discussion about the relevance and implications of a critical literacy approach to education, please visit the CL Zone  of the Forum.
The Critical Literacy in ELT Team has also produced two key documents with the principles that guide this approach and some FAQs.

Team members:

Chris Lima - Porto Alegre, Brazil
Sara Walker - Brasilia, Brazil    [Interim SIG coordinator]
Jose Antonio da Silva - Taguatinga, Brazil
Nella de la Fuente – Chiclayo, Peru
Enrique Basabe - Santa Rosa, Argentina
Sergio Mobilia - Buenos Aires, Argentina
Paulo da Mata – Rondonópolis, Brazil
Eliana Gonçalves Edmundo – Curitiba, Brazil
Clarissa Menezes Jordão – Curitiba, Brazil

For historical reasons [see FAQs] our materials have been hosted by the British Council Online community at www.britishcouncil.org.br/elt

Downloads

• http://www.britishcouncil.org.br/elt/_v2/c_critical_literacy.asp

• A Brief Introduction to Critical Literacy in ELT Education

• Collaborative Approaches to CL in ELT

• http://www.britishcouncil.org.br/elt/_v2/c_resources.asp