Background
The Critical Literacy in ELT Project was one of the outcomes of the Hornby Summer School 2006 in Brazil.

Critical Literacy (CL) was one of four strands in the event and participants explored the theoretical framework and implications of the concept in relation to aims and objectives of ELT and citizenship education, methodological strategies and teacher training. At the end of the event, a group of educators from Brazil, Argentina and Peru, who thought that CL prompted significant changes in ELT practice, decided to present a project proposal.

Thanks to the support of ELTeCS and the British Council Brazil the project was launched in March 2006 and in that year it generated seminars in Brazil and Peru, an online CL Forum on the British Council Brazil ELT Online Community and the publication of the booklet entitled ‘A Brief Introduction to Critical Literacy in English Language Education’.

In March 2007 the CL in ELT Project received the 2007 British Council Innovation Award in a ceremony in London.

Thanks to the funds and support of the Hornby Trust and the British Council Brazil, the project was brought to its second phase in 2007-8, with the creation of the CL Special Interest Group at Braz-Tesol and the organisation of a series of workshops and seminars in Brazil, Argentina and Peru. December 2007 marked the publication of the first sets of materials to be used in the ELT classroom and teacher education programmes. New online versions of the original CL booklet in English, Portuguese and Spanish are now being published and also made available for free download on the BC ELT Community.

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.

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.

- A Brief Introduction to Critical Literacy in ELT Education

- Collaborative Approaches to CL in ELT

Chris Lima
CL Project Coordinator
January 2008