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my aim in the next half an hour is to cover three key points this is what we're going to look at first I'm going to try and explore the relationship between language and power and to try and establish why this is important in our work as language Educators um the second is I would like to unpack this term critical literacy that I have included in my title um and to talk about why it's important for both for us as teachers but also for our Learners and finally I want to look at how to embed critical literacy within

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our own language teaching and in particular how to apply some critical liter literacy strategies with texts that we work with in the classroom so I hope that's what you're here for today um please do comment along in the chat if that's your thing um I can't promise to read all of it because I know it goes very fast um but I'll be um be great to know you're just kind of engaging with the questions and the points that I'm making as we go okay so let's get stuck in um so I'd

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like to begin by asking you uh to think about power and of course I'm here talking about the kind of sociopolitical kind rather than the energy or electrical kind of power what is it what does power mean to you I think we all have a fairly basic understanding of what power is even though it isn't always that tangible it's it's not a very concrete concept and it can be really difficult to define or pin down and there's definitely more than one way of understanding the term power here's a

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useful model by V Classen and Miller the model highlights four different ways of understanding power as I go through them I'd like you to reflect on which one of the four is closest to your own definition of the term so perhaps the most common way of thinking about power is to think about having power over someone or something viewing power in this way can have very negative associations because in order to have power over you must take it from someone else and use it to gain and maintain a dominant position when we

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witness or experience the use of force abuse of power repression or discrimination against individuals or whole groups of people this is power over but there are other ways of understanding power perhaps your own definition was more focused on collaboration solidarity and building Collective Strength if that's the case your understanding of power is closer to that of Power with power with involves multiplying individual talents Knowledge and Skills to try and build Bridges and promote Equity by working together with

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one another or maybe your understanding of power was having the power to do something in this model power to refers to the unique potential of every human being to shape change or have an impact on their life and the world this understanding of power emphasizes that each and every one of us has some power to make a difference and the final way of understanding power according to this model is power within this type of power encompasses a sense of self- knowledge self-worth personal strength and inner

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capacity it's character characterized by Inner resilience self-awareness positive self-belief and authenticity and includes an ability to have hope for the future but what's all this got to do with language teaching well unsurprisingly I'm going to argue it has everything to do with it firstly because I hope we want our Learners to be tapping into their power within their power to and their Collective power with to use the language they're learning to make a positive difference in in the

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world and secondly because it's through language and how we communicate that power is most commonly exercised relationships of Power are evident in language all around us and our Learners need to be able to identify critique and sometimes resist this in their own language use but perhaps a few examples of this would be helpful first so let's now look at some examples from both written and spoken discourse to illustrate how language is used to exert power and influence in all sorts of different contexts but in particular

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politics advertising and the media so one way that we use language to Mark status and show respect to someone with more power is through different forms of address when more formal titles are used to describe or address a person this is one way of showing deference to their perceived status that power can also be relinquished for example by the person with the title insisting on firstname terms or it could be resisted by refusing to use a person's title in this image the owner of the shop here is

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showing a high level of respect and reverence for their customers which might be typical of some cultures but unusual in others another common feature of language andow is the use of metaphor and metaphor is frequently used in advertising as it creates vivid imagery which makes a message more memorable and therefore more powerful metaphors can be also a convenient way to express really complex ideas um that are harder to describe literally this Supermarket ad with the words squeeze more out of your

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shop accompanied by the images of citric fruits it's a clever mental image to convey the idea of saving money the kind of familiar chatty informal language that's commonly used in advertisements like the one on the screen now is designed to influence the customer and ultimately to persuade them to make a purchase the applied linguist Norman Fair cluff called this synthetic personalization this is where language is used to address the masses but a feeling of intimacy and friendliness is created by making it appear as if we're

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being spoken to as individuals because the second person you can refer both to the singular and the plural in English it's used in ad campaigns to make us feel as if the advertisement speaks directly to us which adds power to the message but synthetic personalization doesn't have to include the second person pronoun this clever Specsavers ad is another good example in this campaign the reader is made to feel as if they are singled out because assuming that you're able to actually read the message

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of course it speaks directly to them not only that it thanks them personally for acting on the message and just in case there are some of you who are tuning in on your mobile phones and who can't read the text here it actually says can the people who can read this poster tell the people who can't to book an IT test thanks Specsavers so to be fair to you all um the original was on a billboard poster so a lot larger rather than on a screen so please don't worry if you're one of those people who can't read it

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okay let's look at another example this temporary notice pinned on a pub door reads as if the building or business is speaking to the customer apologizing for its appearance this use of personification where human attributes are applied to non-human entities is another feature of language that can be used to persuade we can find lots of instances of this in marketing rhetorical questions are also commonly used in political speech newspaper headlines in advertising and as slogans of protest they're often used

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suggestively to put an idea into our heads like in this image or to encourage the audience to consider their own personal response to the question being asked and whether language is spoken or written we also pay attention to speech sound properties as we listen and read alliteration which is the repetition of Conant sounds at the beginning of two or more nearby words is one way that authors can draw attention to their core message in a text by linking together thematically related words or ideas many

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big Brands like Coca-Cola for example include alliteration in their brand names or in their company slogans to increase recall and therefore brand recognition this serves to further the power that they have over any potential customers so this is by no means an exhaustive list these are just a few examples to illustrate how language can be used in very different and sometimes very ordinary situations to exert power or to try to gain or maintain power and influence so this relationship between language

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and power I think it's really fundamental to understanding critical literacy and this is what we're going to turn to now grounded in the work of Pao FR in the late 1940s critical literacy is a way of reading texts that helps people understand the connection between language and power for FR reading was not just a mechanical process it wasn't just about coding words but reading the word involved simultaneously reading the world for FR context really mattered and he believed that the way we read any

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text is actually mediated through our day-to-day lived experiences texts themselves are historically and sociopolitical and geographically situated but so too is the act of reading them and therefore literacy is not just about reading the words on a page but it's also about understand understanding the world Beyond it including its many systems and structures of power and making connections between the two so today I'm going to share with you a framework for critical literacy that I'm most familiar with which comes from

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a 2002 paper by niy lewison Amy cely flint and Katie Van Lewis and in this article the authors proposed a four-dimensions model of critical literacy which Drew from many studies published in the 30 years prior to them writing their own so for lewison and her colleagues critical literacy can be understood as firstly disrupting the commonplace interrogating multiple viewpoints focusing on the sociopolitical and finally taking action for social justice so let's examine each of these four dimensions in turn and

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consider how they might relate to a text or in other words what critical question questions just to link back to she's idea of the power of asking questions what critical questions could be asked of a text in order to uncover relationships of power including hidden or obscured meanings assumptions and biases so the first of the four dimensions is disrupting the commonplace and for lewison and her colleagues what this basically involves is questioning commonly accepted ways of viewing the World experience es and ways of being as

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well as analyzing how language supports or can disrupt the status quo and if we were to apply this this um Dimension to a text to disrupt the commonplace here are some examples of questions we might ask do you agree with the message contained in the text are there any messages views or beliefs represented in the text that you disagree with are these viewed views held by many people in wider Society do you agree with the way the author represents Society or the world do you think everybody would read and

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respond to the text in the same way how might a reader's identity affect how they respond to the text and how is your interpretation of this text influenced by your knowledge of when and where it was produced okay so let's move on quickly now to the second dimension this is interrogating multiple viewpoints for lewison and her colleagues this Dimension involves asking whose voices are missing or marginalized from texts or from the world the wide world identifying and evaluating viewpoints different to your

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own and making difference distinct and visible so again some of the questions we might ask of texts that relate to this Dimension include whose voices represented how are these voices represented are they positively represented negatively are they weak are they strong and so on how might the representation of different voices in the text impact the reader's beliefs about these individuals or communities whose voices are missing why might the author have not included those views how are different identities

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represented in the text and to what extent does the author present these identities as complex and multiple do you agree with the way that different identities are represented okay moving on to the third of Lewis's Dimensions this relates to sociopolitical issues and for leison this involves identifying and questioning established social system and structures using literacy to engage in the politics of everyday life examining power relationships between and among individuals Associated questions that we

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or our Learners could ask or text includes what issues systems or structures of Power are represented in the text what if anything promotes protects or threatens the power who in the text text has the most power where does that power come from do characters in the text use their power in a positive or negative way who in the text has the least power why is that and what would need to change for them to become more powerful do you think the representation of power in the text is realistic okay and finally the fourth

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and final um last Dimension taking action so according to this Dimension critical literacy is understood as using language to question practices of privilege and Injustice and bringing about change in inappropriate unequal power relationships and the related problem posing questions does the text contain any messages about how we should or shouldn't act do you agree with them how would reading this text influence the way people think about Society or the world will the text have an impact on

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how you act speak or understand the world does the text make you think you need to change in some way and how can the audience of this text work to change the world for the better so in summary those are the four dimensions of critical literacy it's worth mentioning that for Lewis and her colleagues critical literacy is not a series of activities but it's rather an attitude or a stance it's a kind of orientation that we take towards reading texts on The Wider world that we encounter every day and it's not

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necessary that all of these Dimensions need to be included um in activities that you do in the classroom for students to be engaging in critical Literacy By examining text using any one of these Dimensions you are engaging in critical literacy itself okay so let's get practical I think in the final part of my talk today I want to to focus on three critical literacy strategies that you might want to try out with your learners now to illustrate these three strategies I'm going to use a series of short texts

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however I really want to emphasize that these are strategies that can be applied to almost any text from fairy tales to Tik Tok videos to political speeches these strategies can work with them all so the first of the strategies we're going to look at is called the rest of the story and to illustrate I'm going to show you a short text just for a bit of context the text is an ad for a company called Swiss life which is the largest life insurance company in Switzerland the premise of this ad campaign is that

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our plans in life can change and for this we need to buy life insurance so here is the text and really I'm interested in the first sentence on the screen only she's might everything went wrong the ad plays on this theme of continuity the sentence continues the words keep flowing just like life doesn't stop even when some something dramatic happens in the middle of it but we have to think about it for a second to read it a couple of times just to work out why it doesn't work out grammatically okay here's what I'd like

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you to do first I'd like you to consider what you know okay what do you know from this five-word story only the key information that you are sure about if you'd like to you can pop your ideas in the chat box now what do you know from these five words okay what I think I know is firstly I think there are two characters in this story one of the characters is female and the speaker or the writer loved this other character but something happened something bad okay that's what I know next I want

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you to ask yourself what you don't know what information is missing think about the characters the setting the plot any information you don't yet have and I'd like you to think of questions that you'd like to know the answer to and again you can put these in the chat box if you'd like to so let me give you an example here's one of my questions what is the gender of the speaker or the writer what other questions would you like to know the answer to pop them in the chat box

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now what went wrong yeah did they divorce did she die good questions okay all right here are some other ideas some other questions I'd like to know the answer to what was their relationship okay so were they friends were they partners were they family members and what was the relationship how old are they was this teenage romance was it a lifelong love affair is the speaker human we don't know that could be a a non-human entity what went wrong a lot of you asked this what happened when did they last

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communicate will they ever meet again and there's obviously an assumption there with the again that they've actually met somehow before okay so the idea here really is to practice identifying what we actually know from reading a piece of text and what we don't practice time and time again Learners will soon start to develop an instinct to look for the information that's missing when they read rather than simply taking the information that's presented to them at face value it also highlights that there are many

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different ways of reading a text and that when we read something we don't all come to the same conclusions about it or the same understandings about its meaning now I've just used a very short text to illustrate this strategy but it works just as well with with longer ones okay so that's our first critical literacy strategy we're going to go on to the next now this one is called josing texts it's also a relatively straightforward one but depending on the text that you're

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using it might involve a little bit of preparation simply put it's the idea of putting two similar texts side by side for readers to explore and notice the similarities and differences in the way that information is being presented to them so the key thing is that the texts are about the same topic for example they cover the same news story or maybe they're different versions of the same folk tale something like this but there should be a difference for example they could be authored by different people or

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published at different times or come from different places comparing and contrasting the texts helps to make Salient how the message in the text is presented in a certain way to its audience this in turn may help us as readers to identify specifically who the text is written by for and the author's perspectives assumptions and potential biases okay so I'm going to share two texts with you now I'd like you to take a moment to read and compare them while you're reading I'd like you to think

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about why they might be presented in such a different way there are the two texts have a look why are they presented in such a different way okay we're going to do some critical literacy now so let's have a look at the two texts we don't know if we look at the one on the left we don't know exactly who created this poster because there's no logo there's no clear details of the author included there however we can probably guess that it's some kind of group or organization that wants

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people to be able to vote and from the language and use of you this is evidently the intended audience it's clear that the author also believes that someone or something is trying to disenfranchise voters perhaps by preventing or discouraging them from registering the language of the message is capitalized and uses synthetic personalization which we saw earlier to speak directly to the reader um and this creates a kind of underlying sense of urgency the urgency of the message it also includes a link to the

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British government website and a QR code that actually links to a guardian article about how holding an early election could leave students unable to vote the text on the right also encourages the reader to register to vote but in contrast to the Stark black and white this advert is colorful friendly it's kind of designed to look like a highlighted sticky note and it includes a step-by-step guide to the registration and voting process making it seem easy and straightforward this poster seems more official it's got the

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logos of the local Council and the Electoral Commission in the top corners and a website and contact details at the bottom so why do we think these two texts which ultimately appear to have the same aim to get potential eligible voters to register why do they convey their message in such a different way well if you guess that it's connected to the target audience and where these posters were produced you'd be right so in the first poster the reference to them in don't let you stop don't let them stop you voting refers to

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the government who had recently introduced a new law requiring ID cards to vote in the UK and I spotted this poster on the Street in Brighton last year um it's a city on the south coast of England with a very high student population students who were less likely to have the ID needed to vote but crucially also who would be more likely to vote for the opposition party in contrast the second poster was produced in a constituency that has an older electorate who were more likely to vote for the government but also more

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likely to have the ID required so josing texts just like this is a really fantastic way to develop a more nuanced understanding of local and Global issues that might be important to our Learners as we've seen reading texts side by side can actually open up a whole load of interesting questions unfortunately we don't have time to delve into all of those now but it could also help to develop an appreciation of the sociopolitical and historical context in which a particular text is uced and if you'd like to find um

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examples of news stories to do this with your students there are a few really great sites out there that are worth checking out the first I'd recommend is the BBC review of the papers which every day of the week features screenshots of the front pages of all the major British newspapers and a short summary of the ma major news stories of the day so that's one and then another one I use frequently with students is called news compare this is another useful site for comparing and contrasting texts um

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it's a news story comparison site which basically Aggregates stories on the same topic from the left right and center of the political Spectrum so that you can read them side by side for easy comparison and notice some of the differences okay let's move on now to the final strategy which is missing voices so our final critical literacy strategy that I'd like to to share with you um today this missing voices is all about identifying the voices perspectives and narratives that are centered in a text and also

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simultaneously to identify those that are peripheral or missing entirely and it works best with stories rather than more factual informative texts although you'll see it can also be applied to our work and teaching practices more widely as well so to make this strategy as relevant as possible to your teaching Contex text and your groups of students I'd like you to think about a story that you've used with Learners in class recently so keep this one in mind um it could be a story you've used with

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younger Learners like a story book could be a story from a blog post um a story from a published horsebook a news story any of these will do and the first thing that I'd like you to do once you've chosen your story is identify whose voices are missing from it perhaps there's a character who doesn't speak in the story or who you don't hear from or perhaps there are a number of characters who are sidelined in the background who are not Central to the plot so the first step of this strategy

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is just to identify these individuals or groups and next I'd like you to choose one of the characters from your list and I'd like you to imagine a moment in the story from this character's perspective ideally and if you were doing this with a group of Learners I'd have students write this imagined perspective down at least in Note Form but instead I'm just going to give you a few moments to think about this think about the perspective of your character your sidelined character in the

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story finally in class and unfortunately we can't do this here right now these stories would be swapped or shared by Learners reading aloud their monologues to their partners and as they swap their stories they can think about um and reflect on some of these kinds of questions so firstly I'd invite their Partners to guess who was speaking could they guess which character it was from the story and then at which point they were speaking so what were they talking about what had just happened and and I'd also ask them to

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think about how they felt about this character before reading or hearing the story from their perspective and then how they felt about them afterwards and specifically what language made them feel that way so this critical literacy strategy encourages Learners to see the world through the eyes of others and is hugely important in building empathy it prompts students to think about those who have different life experiences or perhaps even different identities to them and to put themselves in their

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shoes I think there's also a really important extension of this strategy as well that we should all be applying in our work as language Educators critical literacy strategies are not just something that we should be teaching our Learners to practice we should also be implementing this in our everyday professional and personal lives as well so don't stop with the texts your learners read think more broadly about the voices that are missing from our classrooms think about the texts any kind of texts we bring into class and

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that includes audio and vi video texts as well any mo multimodal texts you could think about the guest speakers that you invite to your courses if you if you are able to do that the course books and the texts inside the courses course books that your learners use also any texts that are used in exam testing um any kind of text that that students have to read and respond to and finally the voices of the students themselves and then also thinking more broadly as a profession I think we should continually question who we're

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hearing from whose voices are less likely to be read or heard in our professional contexts and that goes for the reading lists that we include on teacher education courses it goes for the lineup of speakers that we have at teacher conferences um teacher educational programs and also the makeup of management and organizational boards within our industry and within our field I know a lot of progress has been made over recent years to try and ensure that minority groups are better represented and that our profession

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celebrates and nurtures this diversity but there's still a lot of work to be done in challenging stereotypes and breaking down barriers to equal and fair participation and I think we all and play a part in doing that okay so to briefly conclude then at the beginning of this session I set out to try and clarify why thinking about the relationship between language and power should matter to us as language teachers relationships of Power are embedded throughout the language we use and encounter on a daily basis and

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in order to critique or challenge unfair or unequal systems and structures of power languages are really critical IC tool for our Learners to be able to use their power with power to and power within to change the world for the better in the second section of today's talk I introduced Lewis's four-dimensions framework for critical literacy along with some problem posing questions that relate to the different dimensions and can be used with your students to encourage them to think more critically about texts and in the final

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and last part the last few minutes we've briefly explored three critical literacy strategies called the rest of the story juxtaposing texts and missing Voices All of which can be applied to a range of different everyday texts for you and your learners to try and uncover hi hidden meanings and um consider the social implications of what we're reading so I hope this has been a useful and informative session for you thanks so much for your active participation and everybody's contributions in the

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chat box and here is my bibliography with some of the text that I've referenced during this talk thank you so much