Critical Reading

Critical reading is an important skill set for students to master. For successful learning through reading students need to be able to analyze, evaluate and to create with the information they learn through reading. The teacher needs to scaffold the reading and actively teach how to desconstruct and dissect texts in the content area. Chapter 8 in Bean, Baldwin, and Readance gives four strategies to teachers can implement to teach students these necessary skills: Polar Opposites, Opinion-proof, REAP, and Phony Document. It is also included a list of common fallacies that is particularly useful in reminding students what to look for when critiquing a text as well as  pitfalls to avoid when constructing their own arguments in relation to what they have read.

Polar Opposites appears to be a good exercise to use with a level 1 language class. Since these students have limited linguistic output abilities, an activity with a continuum between two emotions or adjectives is a way for them to organize and evaluate the material in a text. The Opinion-proof exercise is an excellent activity to get students to think about how an argument should be constructed and could be used in upper division classes for written responses to texts.  The REAP (read, encode, annotate, ponder) strategy is probably the most widely adaptable strategy and could be used at all language levels. And even though the Phony Document Strategy takes a lot of preparation time, it is a worthwhile activity to help students learn to evaluate and select reliable sources for research projects. 

As experts in content area fields, language teachers constantly employ these methods on informational texts to stay current in their fields. Since world language teachers often live outside of the culture they are teaching, they depend on websites, news articles, and academic journals to stay up-to-date. It is often second nature to an education professional to read critically, however it is not always apparent that these are skills teachers should model and teach to their students. Teachers sometimes assume that students are already capable of critical reading in the content area on their own because they are successful critical readers in their native language. These skills do not always spontaneously transfer; so language teachers need to be prepared to teach critical reading in the world language classroom.