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A project for teaching critical reading and writing

Read about a study that taught students to critically analyse and rewrite everyday texts, helping them spot hidden meanings and think more independently.

Last updated 8 September 2026

Teo, P. (2014). Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar: a project for teaching critical reading and writing. Language and Education, 28(6), 539-551. doi:10.1080/09500782.2014.921191

Background

The author highlighted that numerous teachers’ critical literacy pedagogies mainly took the form of the teacher inviting students to critique and deconstruct texts without giving them the opportunity or equipping them with the skills to reconstruct texts.

Aims

The author investigated students’ receptivity and responsiveness to a reading and writing programme designed to raise their critical awareness of ideological meanings embedded in texts that they read daily (everyday texts).

Sample

The participants comprised a group of high-ability Year 10 students in Singapore.

Method

The students participated in a two-week, intensive three-stage programme that:

  1. exposed them to the ideological meanings and assumptions in everyday texts;

  2. encouraged them to write in response to these texts; and

  3. provided opportunities for them to reflect on their (changed) worldviews

The data comprised texts (advertisements/publicity materials drawn from YouTube and other Web sources) which had been deconstructed and reconstructed by the participants, and their daily reflection logs.

Findings

The results demonstrated that the participants:

  1. better appreciated how the texts were constructed to achieve their aims;

  2. had a deeper understanding of stereotyping;

  3. comprehended the strategies of news discourse production that had enabled them to rewrite news reporting;

  4. understood the gendered nature of news discourse;

  5. interrogated the way news reports were constructed and perpetuated a particular gendered worldview;

  6. engaged and wanted to probe deeper and apply what they had learnt to their immediate context; and

  7. displayed a critically reflexive stance towards the texts presented to them.

Implications

The author highlighted that besides an examination-driven culture that might resist the teaching of critical literacy when such skills are not valued in high-stakes examinations, other factors that could undermine its effective implementation included the common (mis)perception that critical competence is a privilege exclusive to high-ability students. Moreover, critical literacy educators might overemphasize the ‘critical’ at the expense of the ‘literacy’. Anchoring ‘literacy’ firmly in place in a ‘critical literacy’ programme would empower students to become not only critical thinkers but also effective readers and writers.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis.