Orientations to Critical Literacy for EAL/D learners ALFORD & JETNIKOFF

Orientations to Critical Literacy for

English as an Additional Language or
Dialect (EAL/D) learners: A case study
of four teachers of senior English
Jennifer Alford and Anita Jetnikoff
Queensland University of Technology

Abstract
Recently, the debate around critical literacy has dissipated as literacy education agendas and
attendant policies shift to embrace more hybrid approaches to the teaching of senior English.
This paper reports on orientations towards critical literacy as expressed by four teachers of
senior English who teach culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Teachers understandings
of critical literacy are important given the emphasis on Critical and Creative Thinking as well as
Literacy as General Capabilities underpinning the Australian Curriculum. Using critical discourse
analysis and Janks (2010) Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy, interview and classroom data
from four teachers of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners in two
high schools were analysed for the ways these teachers constructed critical literacy in their talk
and practice. While all four teachers indicated significant commitment to critical literacy as an
approach to English language teaching, their understandings varied. These ranged from providing
access to powerful genres, to rationalist approaches to interrogating text, with less emphasis on
multimodal design and drawing on learner diversity. This has significant implications for what
kind of learning is being offered to EAL/D learners in the name of English teaching, for syllabus
design, and for teacher professional development.

Critical Literacy in senior English schooling

Proponents of critical literacy actively resist distilling
it to a single, formulaic method (Collins & Blot, 2003;
Comber, 2001; Janks, 2010, 2014; Luke, 2000, 2012;
Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005). Instead, it is understood to be contingent on localised context and the
material resources, including human, that exist in these
contexts. While approaches taken to exploring literacy
and language critically is open to interpretation, there
is general commitment within the literature that defines
critical literacy as focusing
on teaching and learning how texts work, understanding and re-mediating what texts attempt to do in
the world and to people, and moving students toward
active position-taking with texts to critique and reconstruct the social fields in which they live and work
(Luke, 2000, p.460).

Substantial literature, internationally, calls for the

need for effective critical literacy practice with culturally and linguistically diverse school-age learners
(Alford, 2001; Alford & Jetnikoff, 2011; Hammond &
Macken-Horarik, 1999; Janks, 1991, 1999, 2010; Lau,
2013; Locke & Cleary, 2011; Luke, 1995; McLaughlin
& DeVoogd, 2004a, 2004b; Sandretto, 2011). Much
of the literature, though, centres on primary or junior
high school curriculum and pedagogy which has greater
porosity than senior schooling (Jewitt, 2008). There
remains limited empirical research into how teachers
and students construct and enact critical literacy within
senior high school English and even less with EAL/D
learners.1 Of note, however, are two studies that call
attention to the nature of the official curriculum and
what teachers do with it in terms of critical literacy.
Stevens and Bean (2007) report on a critical literacy

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study with high school seniors in Nebraska, USA.

The teacher, frustrated by constraining curriculum
requirements based on genre approaches to literature,
decided to trial a critical inquiry into a local issue with
her students. They explored how and why familybased farming, as the local economic base, had shifted
significantly over the past few generations. To investigate changes in the agriculture industry and their
local effects, students interviewed farmers, community leaders and others using a critical lens to capture,
describe and interpret the findings (p. 87). The end
product was a documentary created through a process
of deconstructing the material effects of local social
and economic events. In assembling the documentary,
students had to decide which elements of the data and
their interpretation and which design features would
be included in their own representation of the issue in
the documentary. In this way, they were asking critical literacy questions about representation during the
reconstruction and authoring of their own text. Critical literacy questions that are often asked of commercially produced texts, for example, whose interests are
being served?; who is foregrounded or marginalised?,
were turned back on the students own texts, to help
them deploy the resources of textual constructedness
exposed by critical literacy.
More recently and more locally, Locke and Cleary
(2011) conducted a two-year study in New Zealand
high schools on teaching literature in final year (Year 13)
multicultural classrooms. They present four key findings about the critical literacy pedagogy employed: (a)
that close critical reading of texts was multidimensional
and involved teachers drawing on a range of approaches
to literary and textual study including personal growth
models; (b) that the cultural background of the students
influenced the approaches they adopted. The teachers
used both reader response and critical approaches to
open up an avenue to the cultural orientation of the
reader as a determinant of meaning (p.136); (c) that
critical literacy concepts and associated complicated
metalanguage are best taught by exposing students to a
range of texts dealing with a similar topic; and (d) that,
despite initial hesitancy to challenge the authority of
texts, students were empowered by critical literacy to
contest and resist invited readings. These two studies,
conducted in New Zealand and the United States, indicate the possibilities teachers have to work agentively
with critical literacy within mandated curriculum. The
present study investigated how this might be happening
in classrooms in Queensland, Australia.
Senior English as a subject in Australian schools is
mandatory and students must achieve a satisfactory
grade in order to be eligible for entry into university.

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Many senior high school EAL/D learners have not yet

mastered Standard Australian English at an independent
academic level, and yet they have aspirations for
tertiary study. One of the key questions, then, driving
the research project on which this paper reports was:
How do teachers of EAL/D learners understand critical
literacy and make it comprehensible for their learners?
The situation is complex since critical literacy itself
remains contested terrain within Australian curriculum
documents.

Critical Literacy in the Australian senior

English curriculum From the Literacy Wars
to now
The current EAL/D draft of the senior years units
in the Australian Curriculum: English or AC:E v 7.5
(Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority (ACARA), 2015) espouses a largely functional approach to language, with its references to
contexts, audiences and explicit inclusion of register;
terms which clearly emerge from Systemic Functional
Linguistics. However, there is some emphasis on design
of multimodal tasks as well as positioning the student
as text analyst, drawn from a multi-literacies approach
to literacy education (The New London Group, 2006).
There is also a focus on evaluating perspectives, representations, attitudes, culturally based values, assumptions and beliefs, across the senior units. These latter
references are all consistent with the metalanguage of
critical literacy as we know it. However, the states and
territories have made no rapid moves to incorporate
the ACARA senior years units into their programs, so
this is still in its draft from. Queensland is not considering moving to this senior framework until 2018. The
emphasis in the AC:E framework is not inconsistent
with the blended approach in the Syllabus that these
teachers were working with in Queensland at the time
of the data collection in 2010.
Since the alleged literacy wars (Snyder, 2009),
critical literacy as we know it has been diluted in
various curricular domains. There was a very public
debate in the media, from 2006 forwards, mainly in
The Australian newspaper, where English teachers
were castigated for being too critical. In subject
English, this critical literacy approach along with other
pedagogical approaches, reigned for some years in this
state, from the implementation of the 2002 Senior
mainstream English Syllabus (Queensland Board of
Senior Secondary School Studies (QBSSSS2),2002)
until it was superseded by the 2008 Queensland Studies
Authority (QSA, 2008) and then the redrafted 2010
(QSA, 2010) versions. The approach to teaching and
assessment was based on Greens 3D model (in Nixon,

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Orientations to Critical Literacy for EAL/D learners ALFORD & JETNIKOFF

2003), which translated into a context-text model,

so that cultural and social contexts became part of
the textual mix along with textual features and text
constructedness. This afforded the study of English a
critical rigour which was reduced when the syllabus
replaced the third criterion of text constructedness
(QBSSSS, 2002) with creating and/or evaluating
meaning (QSA, 2010). Both these more recent
syllabus documents retained some central concepts
from critical literacy, such as representations, reading
position and the substitution of values, attitudes and
beliefs in place of the theoretical concept of Discourse.
In the 2002 version of the English syllabus, Discourse
was defined as:
Discourse refers to the cultural and social practices
through which individuals and groups use language to
establish their identities and membership of groups and
to become aware that they are playing socially meaningful roles. Discourses provide ways of being, thinking
and acting and of using language so that individuals
and groups can identify themselves or be identified in
social and cultural networks. (QBSSSS, 2002, p.2)

These substitutions diluted the theoretical position of

critical literacy concepts in both analysis and assessment of textual products in subject area English.
The equivalent version of the Queensland EAL/D
syllabus documents saw a similar eroding of these
central critical literacy concepts, with the redrafting of
the relevant senior EAL/D syllabus documents between
2007 and 2009 (see Alford, 2014). According to senior
teachers in the field, the hasty redrafting of the EAL/D
syllabus in 2009 was done by the QSA without consultation with the EAL/D teachers who had written the
2007 version, and the reworked version made it more
aligned with the mainstream English syllabus. As one
EAL/D teacher reported: The criteria are awful
Theyve telescoped all sorts of things in. Theyve lost
the ESL-ness of it. Its just not ESL; its an English set
of criteria (interview March 17, 2010). This aligning
of the syllabuses performs important discursive work
at the structural level of the social order that consequently influences local practice. This discussion
becomes significant when considering if and how
EAL/D students have access through syllabuses to
rigorous critical literacy instruction. In Janks (2010)
terms, reducing the presence of critical literacy in official syllabuses gives teachers and students less opportunity, and authority, to engage with the full affordances
of combined orientations to critical literacy. In this
study, this manifested in the teachers ability to provide
lessons that contested notions of power in texts, but as
the data in this study shows, it gave them less access

to designing and redesigning products or texts that

include consideration and active deployment of critical
concepts.

Research design
The study used a critical, multiple instrumental case
study design (Simons, 2009) to investigate the critical
literacy practices of four Australian teachers of EAL/D
learners in senior English, in two different school sites.
Instrumental case study methodology was used in order
to obtain a rich, comprehensive picture of the issue of
teaching critical literacy with EAL/D learners. The
research questions reported on in this paper are: What
understandings about critical literacy do teachers of
EAL/D articulate and why?; and how do they enact
critical literacy with their particular learners?

Participant selection
The research was conducted with four senior high
school English teachers in two state high schools in
Queensland. Using purposive sampling, the four
teachers were employed as EAL/D teachers, rather than
subject English teachers, and were teaching the English
for ESL Learners Syllabus (QSA, 2007, amended 2009),
during 2010. The participants, Margot and Celia at
Beacon High School, and Riva and Lucas at Riverdale High School3 (3 females and 1 male) had varying
EAL/D teaching experience and varying qualifications.
None had received specific professional development
training in critical literacy through their education
jurisdiction. One had learned about critical literacy in
undergraduate studies and one had learned about it in a
Masters degree. Their ages ranged from mid-thirties to
late fifties. Two were Anglo-Australians and two were
of Italian-Australian background.
The teachers in each school worked with learners
from a range of countries of origin and language
backgrounds Afghanistan, Burundi, Brazil, China,
Congo, Ethiopia, Fiji, France, Germany, Hungary,
Italy, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua
New Guinea, Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan,
Uganda, and Vietnam. Many were refugee-background
learners who had experienced interrupted education.
Many of the learners at Beacon High School were in
this category. The learners (1728 in each class) were
assessed as generally being between levels 4 to 6 on
the ESL Bandscales (McKay, Hudson, Newton &
Guse, 2007) which means they still required considerable language and content support from specialist
English language teachers in order to succeed given the
language demands of senior schooling.

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Data collection
Data were collected via semi-structured interviews,
video recordings of teachers classroom practice, documents, field notes and stimulated verbal recall (SVR)
comments (Smagorinsky, 2001). Each teacher participated in four interviews: three across one school term
(beginning, middle and end), and one stimulated verbal
recall interview at the end of the term where teachers
selected one of the classroom video recordings to view
and comment on. Three lessons were video recorded
again at beginning, middle and end points of the term,
at the teachers discretion. State curriculum documents
and school planning documents were also analysed.

Analytic method
Faircloughs (2003) textually-oriented CDA analytic
method was used to examine linguistic properties of
the data texts closely using CDA tools, so that linguistic
form as well as content was given appropriate attention. These properties, Fairclough (2003) argues, are
extraordinarily sensitive indicators of socio-cultural
processes, relations and change (p. 4). Fairclough
provides linguistic analytic tools, drawing from
Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978; 1994),
to allow the analyst to oscillate between the specific
text in question and the network of social practices the
text is situated within. Particular attention was paid to
the representations, actions and ways of acting and the
ways of identifying evident in their talk and classroom
practice, as textual indicators of their particular orientations toward critical literacy. Fairclough (2003) sees
each of these three elements working in combination to
produce social practice (e.g., teaching critical literacy
in schools) and that people use a range of features of
language to indicate each of these aspects of social
practice, as shown in Table 1.
The data were analysed using this method which then

allowed interpretation of the teachers social practice in

terms of Janks (2010) Orientations to Critical Literacy
Model, which was used as an explanatory framework.
In other words, particular combinations of Discourses,
Genres and Styles (Fairclough, 2003) evident in the
teachers talk and classroom practice were found to
yield different orientations towards critical literacy
(Janks, 2010).4

Explanatory framework Janks Synthesis

Model (2010)
To explore the orientations of the four teachers, Janks
(2010) Orientations to Critical Literacy Model was
used as an explanatory framework to further organise
the data into four categories: Domination, Access,
Diversity and Design. Other representations of interest
also emerged in the teachers talk and practice in relation to critical literacy but these will not be discussed
in this paper. Janks (2010) model suggests that literacy
teaching, including the teaching of critical literacy, is
contested and is not a neutral activity. In this model,
Janks maintains that four orientations to the teaching
of critical literacy are possible Domination, Access,
Diversity and Design that they are interdependent
and need to be held in productive tension to achieve
what is a shared goal of all critical literacy work: equity
and social justice (Janks, 2010, p. 27). Domination
assumes a critical discourse analysis approach in which
the language and images in dominant texts are deconstructed to discover concepts such as fore-groundings,
silences and whose interests are served. Access involves
making explicit the features of the genres that carry
social power, for example, analytical essays and reports,
hitherto assumed to be already in some learners heads.
Diversity involves drawing on a range of modalities
as resources and to include students own diverse
languages and literacies. Finally, Design asks teachers

Table 1. Aspects of social practice and associated textual features (based on Fairclough, 2003).
Aspect of social practice

Linguistic markers

Representation: Ways of representing aspects of the world

through language (e.g., critical literacy as a concept in this
study) = Discourses.

Elements of transitivity (Halliday, 1978) participants (who

or what is acting) and processes (how are they acting); themes
and associated lexical items; and metaphor.

Action: Ways of acting/interacting within a social event

which includes enacting social relations (e.g., ways of doing
critical literacy teaching) = Genres.

Dominant semantic/grammatical relations between sentences

and clauses; higher-level semantic relations over long stretches
of text; predominant grammatical moods (declarative,
imperative or interrogative)?

Identification: Ways of being/identifying with some

position; indicates degree of commitment and judgement of
something (in this case critical literacy) = Styles.

Modality (commitment to truth i.e., epistemic modalities)

and necessity/obligation (deontic modalities); evaluation (e.g.,
through the use of adjectives or qualifiers); and assumed
values.

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to harness the productive power of diverse learners to

create their own meanings through re-construction of
texts. Students use a range of media and technologies
to do so without relying on traditional print media
and essayist literacy (Street, 1984). Offering students
control over text production, the opportunity to talk
back to texts and to produce texts that matter to them,
is considered important for agency and identity transformation. This model shows the interdependence each
dimension has with the other, and critiques unitary
orientations that exclude the other dimensions. Any
one dimension, without the others, creates an imbalance that denies students the opportunity to experience the full range of critical literacy education. Table
2 explains the interdependence of the four elements of
the model and highlights the need to weave all four
together in the practice of teaching critical literacy.
Janks model is particularly valuable for exploring
critical literacy within EAL/D teaching as it takes into
account a perennial problem: the access paradox
(Janks, 2004; 2010; Lodge, 1997). The access paradox
recognises that deconstructing texts without providing
knowledge of how those texts are constructed in the first
place, excludes learners from powerful language varieties that manifest as linguistic capital. This, in turn, can
limit learners life opportunities and confine them to
marginalised language use in their own communities.
However, without deconstruction or a view of language
as power, an Access model on its own naturalises and
privileges powerful language forms and genres. It does
not question whose power is being duplicated (Delpit,
1995) and undervalues students own forms of expression and knowledge. Janks model provides an ideal
world model of teaching critical literacy, suggesting
teachers move between each of the orientations in order
to achieve a well-rounded critical literacy experience for
learners. Reality for teachers often prevents this from
happening. Janks acknowledges this and suggests that
the model does not prevent teachers from working with
one orientation at a time but that each should be given
equal weighting in a curriculum (Janks, 2010, p.27).

Findings and discussion

The following discussion of data is structured around
Janks (2010) model, however rather than describing
what the teachers were not doing, we present the analysis in terms of what the teachers were doing, hence
the use of with not without. This indicates the
affordances of their knowledge and practice at the time.
Reframing the model in terms of affordances has added
explanatory power as it shows a picture of what was
possible and allows multiple, generative combinations
across the dimensions, for example, Domination with

Access with Diversity. This shows teachers in particular, what can possibly occur if various combinations
are employed and what is missing if various combinations are not deployed.
In the following section, we provide analysis of representative data (from the larger study) that indicate three
significant combinations of orientations demonstrated
by the four teachers in their lessons across a school
term. We then discuss the combinations that were not
as evident and suggest reasons for why this may be so.

1. Domination with Access allows the

exclusionary force of dominant discourses to
be challenged and potentially dissipated
The parent texts in focus in the lessons were deconstructed in detail by the teachers and students for their
Domination potential. Riva and Lucas at Riverdale
High explored YouTube documentaries, and Margot
at Beacon High interrogated television and print news
media texts to show how such texts are invested with
power through semiotic choices in representations. The
Domination orientation featured significantly in the
data from Riva, Lucas and Margot. In the first interview, at the beginning of the first term, Riva was asked
what she understood critical literacy to be. (Capitals
indicate stress placed on the word by the teacher in the
original talk).
Riva: I think its an understanding of the way language
works to do more than just carry information, it conveys
information but it persuades, it distributes power and
um, affects relationships and I cant say this without
using the critical language Privileging, marginalising, silencing. I think its what language does. (Riva,
Interview 1)

Her language choices include particular lexical items

(Discourses) such as power, marginalising, silencing as
well as declarative verb moods (Genres) and epistemic
modality (Styles) indicated by first person I statements.
These language choices work together to texture her
understanding of how language works and the power
texts can wield from a critical perspective. This was
also evident in her classroom talk. In the following
extract, Riva is working her way through the key
concepts on Powerpoint slides and speaking to her Year
11 class of ESL learners.
Riva: A representation works within a construction
of reality. So its like construction of reality is the
big picture, and the representation can be of people,
of ideas, of things that happen, of groups of people
So, when constructing his reality, or her reality, the
documentary maker will be representing the scientists
in a particular way and representing the pandas, who
are a character here, in a particular way. So they are
representing people, ideas and the issue, the situation.

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This situation has been represented in a particular way

and it could have been represented the situation could
have been represented much more negatively, couldnt
it? So, these arise from the point of the view of the
text creator, the maker of the text, the writer, filmaker,
the poet, the playwright, whoever makes the text; their
point of view, their own personal context Their ideas
about the world, their beliefs, their values, what they
think is important and true affects how they represent
people, ideas and things, and affects the world that they
develop and show you. (Riva, Lesson 1)

Here, Riva employs certain lexical items which Fairclough (2003) argues shows the Discourses she draws
upon, for example, representations, construction of
reality, beliefs and values. These suggest an approach
to the language and images in the documentary that
deconstructs the potential domination of texts
through concepts such as fore-groundings and silences
and interests served. There is consistent use of the
declarative verb mood with one tag question, couldnt
it? which has a declarative effect (Genres), and a causal
relationship over the course of her talk (Styles) between
representations that arise from an authors point of
view that then influence readers.
At Beacon High, where most of the students in the
Year 11 class were refugee-background learners from
sub-Saharan Africa, Margot deconstructs dominant
views in the media in relation to her students lived
experience.
Margot: Why are we looking at how the media represents people? How does it affect you?
Male student: Future generations.
Female student: Because we are African.
Margot: Yeah, youre Africans, but why does, how does
it affect you not not being represented in the media?
No seriously, how does it affect you for example if you
do not see yourself in the media?
Male student: Youre unwanted.
Margot: Good. Thank you.
Female student: Thats how forget us.
Margot: You feel and this is the kind of stuff you can
be putting into your report. So well start making some
notes. You feel left out. So people who are not represented thats an excellent, thats a fantastic point
you feel left out. You feel that you dont belong to the
community. Are you reflected in the media? No you are
not. So you feel left out. You become
Male student: Invisible.
Margot: invisible (writes on whiteboard). We cant
see you, exactly. Just getting back to left out can you
give me some other words we could use instead of left
out?
Male student: Marginalised.
Female student: Excluded.

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Male student: Looked past.

Margot: Marginalised. Excluded (writes on the
whiteboard)
Female student: Omitted.
Margot: Alienated? To feel alienated means that you
feel like an alien, and an alien is a person who doesnt
belong in the group you are outside the group. If
youre engaged in something engaged in something,
you are involved. Okay, so if you are disengaged it
means that you are not involved. So its that feeling of
not being involved in something. If you are disengaged
you are not involved. Are we talking just about a classroom for example?
Male student: No.
Margot: Were talking the community. Were talking
about Australian society.
(Margot, Lesson 2).

Through the interaction, Margot encourages her

learners to challenge the potentially dominating power
of representation that is assumed in media texts. She
does this predominately by eliciting from her students
particular lexical items (Discourses) that actually
identify her own assumed values, (Styles) e.g., invisible, marginalised, excluded, alienated. At the same
time, Margot was expanding the students vocabulary
providing Access to language, and at later points in
the lesson, the language of the required report. For
example,
Margot: So, we talked about the different parts of a
report, now we need to look at what kind of language
you need to be using Reports use passive verbs.
Okay, to make them sound objective. Now what do I
mean by objective? (Margot Lesson 2)

Obligation (Styles), evident in the word need and

the declarative verb mood used (Genres) signify that
Margot thinks providing Access to such language is an
important part of her critical literacy teaching. Three
of the four teachers indicated that this combination of
orientations Domination with Access can comfortably co-exist in EAL pedagogy. This has not always
been the case in the teaching of English language
learners where critical orientations have been sidelined
due to a perceived need for these learners to receive
more functional literacy instruction (Locke & Cleary,
2011; Sandretto & Tilson, 2015). By using the interrogative verb mood (Genres) directed at her students
lived experiences, and the metaphor of the alien
(Discourses), Margot also exhibits Janks Diversity in
this example by drawing specifically on the students
own African identities and histories to help them to
see that the concept of representation in the media has
direct impact on their own lives.

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2. Access with Domination provides a view of

texts and discourses as reproducible but always
invested with power
All four teachers provided students with considerable
Access to powerful education genres, for example,
analytical essays and investigative reports. These genres
were deconstructed for their functional elements, that
is, generic structure and language features. When asked
to reflect on the first lesson observed, Margot at Beacon
High commented:
Margot: To me, that (lesson) was one of those very
basic genre scaffolding, modelling types of lessons
which have to be done I guess I just really wanted to
make sure that the kids had an idea of what the actual
genre looked like, see how language is being used in
that particular genre to convey the message that you
want to convey, and how the different parts of the genre
work together to achieve that particular aim as well.
(Margot, Interview 2)

The language choices made by Margot suggest an

Access orientation. Transitivity analysis (Discourses)
revealed participants such as I and the kids with the
teacher, I, wanting to make sure that the kids got
an idea of the genre structure, and that they saw how
language was used to convey a message and achieve a
purpose. The process see is of interest as it involves
actually looking at something but also coming to know
something, in this case the nature of the expository
report genre.
Lucas at Riverdale High also explained how he
provides Access.
Lucas: They understand the critical terminology and
how they are being positioned; whether or not they can
write it fluently is the big ask for any ESL student. With
regards to this documentary and the next couple, we
give them a lot of terminology and we unpack some
of the terminology that they are going to be hit with.
We also give them, the first thing that we give them are
cloze exercises that have those words missing but have
the sentence starters and (we) show them (that) this is
how we want you to talk about the documentary. We
might give them a few topic sentences and (then we)
SEE what they come up with after that. We scaffold
them with regards to the requirements of an essay, their
introductory sentence, their thesis, their preview and all
that, everything that has to do with the genre as well.
Every time that we speak about this I would be using
the terminology that I expect them to have in the essay.
We do give them a model. I think the model is about the
Disneyland (documentary) so they can actually see how
the different critical aspects have been spoken about
like colour, music, camera angles. (Lucas, Interview 2)

In terms of Discourses, the participants and processes

chosen by Lucas we give; we unpack; we want;
we scaffold suggests the teachers at his school are
providing the students with Access (in Janks model)

to knowledge of dominant genres (i.e., the analytical

essay) alongside the critical exploration of the elements
of design such as colour, music, camera angles that
invite a certain reader positioning.
Figure 1 shows Lucas providing Access to Knowledge
About language (KAL) in an A standard model essay.
Attention was drawn to lexical items (Discourses) such
as representations, marginalisation, gaps and silences,
and how they are used in sentences using highlighting.
Attention was also drawn to key verbs that help create
the formal register and specialised vocabulary required
for a critical literacy analytical response essay in senior
English assessment, for example, construct, create,
position, all of which provides Access.

Figure 1. Lucas shows a highlighted model to the class.

(Permission was obtained to use all images).

However, these genres of power were not always

analysed critically to show how they in themselves
reproduce and reinforce power. They largely remained
unquestioned and untransformed and the strict reproduction of them was assessed. Thus a vital part of
Access is missing recognising whose power is being
duplicated in texts and how that power functions
(Delpit, 1995).

3. Domination with Diversity invites

contestation and change brought about by
alternative perspectives/discourses/languages/
literacies
The teachers task instructions are of interest in terms
of Faircloughs (2003) ways of acting and interacting
(Genres) and ways of identifying (Styles) and what
orientations to critical literacy they suggest. In Year 12
at Beacon High, students examined a political speech
for aspects of power and then chose their own issue of
oppression and wrote a speech using their own histories and perspectives but again following a set model in
one mode a written transcript of a persuasive speech.
Notably, this remained at transcript level in written
mode, which will be discussed further below.

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Table 2. The Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy (Janks, 2010, p.26)

Domination without access

This maintains the exclusionary force of dominant discourses.

Domination without diversity

Domination without difference and diversity loses the ruptures that

produce contestation and change.

Domination without design

The deconstruction of dominance, without reconstruction or design,

removes human agency.

Access without domination

Access without a theory of domination leads to the naturalisation of

powerful discourses without an understanding of how these powerful
forms came to be powerful.

Access without diversity

Access without design
Diversity without domination

This fails to recognise that difference fundamentally affects pathways to

access and involves issues of history, identity and value.
This maintains and reifies dominant forms without considering how
they can be transformed.
This leads to a celebration of diversity without any recognition that
difference is structured in dominance and that not all discourses/genres/
languages/literacies are equally powerful.

Diversity without access

Diversity without access to powerful forms of language ghettoises

students.

Diversity without design

Diversity provides the means, the ideas, the alternative perspectives for
reconstruction and transformation. Without design, the potential that
diversity offers is not realised.

Design without domination

Design without an understanding of how dominant discourses/practices

perpetuate themselves, runs the risk of an unconscious reproduction of
these forms.

Design without access

This runs the risk of whatever is designed remaining on the margins.

Design without diversity

This privileges dominant forms and fails to use the design resources
provided by difference

Celia: [addressing the class] So, the genre is persuasive.

Its a persuasive text. Youre going to convince people
to take some form of action. You want to change attitudes or beliefs, or both, or you want to reinforce and
strengthen certain attitudes that the collective group
would hold. Now youve got a particular purpose. Now
you choose who you want to be. You can be a person
an historical person thats achieved great things, or you
can be an imaginary person. You can make something
up. But youve got to be focusing on oppression and
the fight for freedom. So you need to use persuasive
structure. (Celia, lesson 2)

The high frequency of use of you and your as participant pronouns with processes such as choose and the
modal verb can suggests the students have some agency
suggesting a degree of Diversity (Discourses) being
incorporated into Celias teaching and assessment. She
will give students choice about the issue and context
and their role. When it comes to the actual text type,
she uses declarative verb moods (Genres) and relational
identifying processes (Discourses): So, the genre is
persuasive; as well as deontic modality (Styles): you

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need to use persuasive structure (of a written speech)

indicating an Access model but with limited multimodal
Design options. The task allows students to experiment
with the constructedness of texts to achieve ideological
purposes, or exploring Domination, in Janks model. In
this way, Celia provides a view of texts as reproducible
but also inevitably invested with power.
Similarly, students in Year 11 at Beacon High were
asked to create their own thesis about media portrayal
of a particular group in society, for example, refugees
or youth, and to then write an investigative report
following a set model. They provided an alternative view
of this group thereby contesting dominant versions of
reality by drawing on the students own Diversity. Both
teachers at Riverdale interrogated several YouTube
documentaries taken from the Australian Broadcasting
Corporations Race Around the World documentary
series (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC),
19971998). The subject matter of the documentaries
included Chinese panda research and cultural representations within Disneyland in an attempt to make

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content relevant to the diversity in the classroom.

Students shared their readings of the documentaries in
order to construct a group practice analytical essay as
shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Riva moves around the classroom assisting the groups

to share their readings and construct their part of the group
practice essay.

However, elements to be commented on in the essay

were prescribed by the teacher, for example music,
camera angles, language used (one per group of 46
students). While these are useful for exploring visual
texts critically, commentary on the construction of the
text from the students own diverse readings or perspectives, and drawing on their own languages and literacies
were not called for or foregrounded. The teachers were
drawing on texts from various cultures, however, the
students were invited to deconstruct it from a textual
level rather than deconstructing from the perspective
of their own individual, culturally-inscribed values,
attitudes and beliefs. Such an alignment could have
provided an opportunity for the students to talk back
to the text, which is one of the strengths of a critical
literacy approach.
Table 3 shows the key evidence (from across the data
in the larger study) for the various combinations of
Janks teachers work.
Within the constrained critical literacy parameters
suggested by the ESL Senior Syllabus (QSA, 2007
amended 2009), all four teachers appear to combine
various orientations to critical literacy in Janks terms,
most notably Access and Domination with some Diversity. The findings, however, trigger an important question: why doesnt a Design element of critical literacy
exist to a greater degree in this teaching context, at a
time when multi-literacies Design is lauded in contemporary literacy teaching? (see Jewitt, 2008; McLean,
Boling & Rowsell, 2009; Mills, 2011). We offer some
possible reflections on this in the following section.
1. Time. The findings reveal that the four teachers are
working hard at getting the students to understand
English express themselves in English -covering Access,

Domination and some Diversity but cannot find time

to do the Design in terms of multi-modal texts. The
teachers were drawing largely on a functional model of
text helping their learners to catch up with their first
language counterparts in terms of understanding and
replicating dominant genres of power. This is important cultural and social knowledge for these learners.
They need to demonstrate mastery of these elements
of literacy in order to be successful in assessment
items which are largely produced in the written mode.
However, this appears to leaves no time for demonstrating Design as a key aspect of critical literacy (see
also Sandretto & Tilson, 2015). The four dimensions of
Janks model come together in the production not just
reception/consumption of texts.
2. Policy constraints. As mentioned earlier, the ideological debate around the presence of critical literacy
within English curriculum has led to a reduced focus
on critical literacy in the Queensland syllabus. Functional elements of learning to be literate have been
foregrounded in policy. While teachers have agency in
enacting policy locally, this still has implications for
teacher knowledge and practice. Teachers cannot practise what they do not know and education authorities are
unlikely to provide learning opportunities for knowledge that is not valued in official policy. This brings us
to our final reflection professional development.
3. Teacher Professional Development. The teachers in
the study were working above and beyond the call of
duty to help their students engage with and produce
critically literate understandings of texts. They had
certain understandings of critical literacy gleaned
from their own post graduate study and from reference
books, but had had minimal professional development
in critical literacy. To produce multimodal texts with
design elements means accessing and teaching technologies, all of which takes time, knowledge and skill on the
part of teachers who may not feel adequately trained
in production (Jetnikoff, 2015). Being able to analyse
visual and media texts and being able to produce them
require very different skills to that of monomodal
texts (Kress, 2010). Unless students have one- to- one
laptops and readily available software, with which the
teachers are au fait this adds an extra layer of time
and teaching knowledge that is not readily available to
educators desperately trying to fulfil mandated Syllabus
requirements.

Limitations
The study has explored the articulated knowledge
and practice of four particular teachers in particular
contexts in Australia and therefore findings are not

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Table 3. Affordances of the combinations of orientations to Critical Literacy evident in this study
Affordances

Evidence at Beacon High and Riverdale High

Domination with access

allows the exclusionary force
of dominant discourses to be
challenged and potentially
dissipated.

Texts were deconstructed in detail by Riva and Lucas at Riverdale High, e.g., YouTube
documentaries and by Margot at Beacon High through media texts, to show how they are
invested with power through semiotic choices. All four teachers provided students with
access to powerful education genres, e.g., analytical essays and investigative reports, and
these genres were deconstructed functionally (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) but not critically
to show how the texts in themselves reproduce and reinforce power. They remained
unquestioned/untransformed and the strict mimetic reproduction of them was assessed.
Thus a vital part of Access was missing recognising whose power is being duplicated in
texts and how that power functions (Delpit, 1995).

Domination with diversity

invites contestation and
change brought about by
alternative perspectives/
discourses/
languages/literacies.

Following critical interrogation of media texts, students at Beacon High created their own
thesis about media portrayal of a particular group in society, for example, refugees or
youth, and then wrote an investigative report following a set model. In Year 12 at Beacon
High, students examined a political speech for aspects of power and then chose their own
issue of oppression and wrote a speech using their own histories and perspectives but again
following a set model in one mode- a written, persuasive speech. Both teachers at Riverdale
interrogated several YouTube documentaries and students offered their own diverse readings
of them in order to construct a group practice essay. However, elements to be covered in the
essay were pre-set, for example, music, camera angles, language used.

Domination with design

allows for creative
reconstruction based on an
understanding of power.

Students gained an understanding of how power is exercised through semiotic choices

in texts but were not encouraged to redesign/transform the models in any way though
the potential was there in Celias Year 12 political speech task which as a hortatory text
advocates change to the status quo.

Access with domination

provides a view of texts and
discourses as reproducible
but always invested with
power.

There was a pervasive view among the four teachers that powerful genres, e.g., analytical
essays need to be made explicit to EAL/D learners who are still mastering literacy in
SAE. However, all teachers and in particular Lucas indicated that this combination of
orientations (access with domination) can comfortably co-exist. Some other powerful
texts online documentaries and TV and print media texts and some discourses within
them were challenged, e.g., Disneylands commercialism; the nature of scientific knowledge;
racism; ageism. The potential for Celia to do this more overtly was apparent in her lesson on
writing a political speech.

Access with diversity

recognises that learners
bring different histories,
identities and values to text
production.

There was limited opportunity to bring different histories, identities and values to text
production is evident except in Year 11 at Riverdale with the analytical essay where
students produced an essay in a group each taking responsibility for a paragraph one
lesson. Students may or may not have done so though, as the emphasis was clearly on
re-producing the model. Riva used some diverse multimodal texts (e.g., Japanese Manga
cartoons) recognising students own literacy practices and she drew on their own readings
of texts in Lesson 1. In Year 12 at Beacon High, students could bring their own history/
experience of oppression to the writing task by choosing the purpose and audience of the
speech transcript.

Access with design gives

diverse learners the chance
to transform dominant texts
using multiple sign systems.

There was some use of Design elements in Celias Year 12 speech writing task. However, the
students did not engage in transforming dominant texts using multiple sign systems.

Diversity with domination

celebrates difference
but recognises that it is
structured in dominance and
can be challenged.

At Beacon High, the students were able to draw on their own histories and perspectives
to create a thesis for their investigative report. Their own languages and out of school
literacies, however, were not encouraged. The Year 11 documentary task at Riverdale
demonstrated how teachers can draw on diverse texts, such as Chinese scientific reports
about pandas, and showed how these text types, too, are structured purposefully for certain
effects, construct certain dominant discourses and are open to contestation.

Diversity with access allows

difference to be brought into
dominant language forms.

There was little scope for including aspects of diversity, such as other languages and literate
practices, as teachers concentrated on providing access to the dominant language form of
Standard Australian English (SAE) including Knowledge About Language or KAL which is
to be expected in an EAL/D class.

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Diversity with design realises

the potential diversity offers
in reconstructing texts.

The students in Celias Year 12 class were able to draw on their own ideas and positions
to write their hortatory political speech. However, they did not engage in transforming
dominant texts using multiple sign systems as a resource.

Design with domination

provides understanding of
how dominant practices are
perpetuated and how they
can be transformed.

The students did not engage in transforming dominant texts using deconstruction or
multiple sign systems.

Design with access creates

potential for new forms to
be accepted by/as dominant
practices.

The students did not engage in transforming dominant texts using access to multiple sign
systems to create new forms.

Design with diversity

provides opportunity to draw
on difference as a resource
for design.

The students in Celias Year 12 class were able to draw on their own ideas, experiences
and positions to write their hortatory speech including written, linguistic features.
However, they did not engage in transforming dominant texts using multiple sign systems
as a resource. Significantly, they did not deliver their speeches which could have deployed
elements of visual design to support a spoken text, making the task mulitmodal.

generalisable. However, in exploring multiple cases, we

have identified common issues in each case and also
the points of difference, thus enabling the derivation of
some general propositions across all cases. They may,
however, resonate with similar teachers working in
similar contexts (Simons, 2009) where critical literacy is
not valued as a necessary component of literacy education, or where it is being enacted in delimited ways. In
addition, interpretations were regulated by the lens of
Janks framework which is one framework among a
range of equally useful frameworks.

Conclusion and implications

Amid polemical, public debate about literacy agendas,
waning presence of critical literacy in policy frameworks and limited professional development, this study
showed how four teachers demonstrated teacher knowledge of and ways to enact critical literacy with senior
high school EAL/D learners. It identified the ways
their articulated understandings enhance or constrain
learning experiences for senior EAL/D students at this
point in time. The affordances evident show the main
constitutions are that of Access and Domination with
less evidence of Diversity and much less of Design.
Their particular practice provides some insights into
how teachers can address the metalinguistic demands
of critical literacy, which Locke and Cleary (2011)
suggest remains unresolved and widespread in the
Anglophile world. However, their approach does not
encompass fully the rich dimensions of critical literacy
envisaged by Janks (2010). We suggest the teachers
current orientations are directly relatable to broader

contextual constraints that is, the influence of the

media debate around literacy on syllabus design; local
syllabus requirements and limitations; lack of professional development in critical literacy for teachers; lack
of time; and lack of resources particularly relating to
Design. The gaps evident in their talk and practice point
the way for future research on utilising more fully a
Diversity and Design approach to teach critical literacy
concepts (Lewis, 2014) and the critical consumption
and production of texts. It also highlights the need for
greater professional development with such teachers in
order to expand their understandings and practice so
that it might encompass more fully the transformative
goals of critical literacy.

Notes
1 In Australia, the term EAL/D has replaced the term ESL
(English as a Second Language) as many students who are
learning English already speak two or more languages.
The D element caters for Indigenous students who are
learning Standard Australian English as an additional
language or dialect, in addition to their own language/s
or dialect/s. EAL/D is synonymous with the term ELLs
(English Language Learners) used in the United States.
2 Queensland Board of Secondary School Studies (QBSSSS)
became Queensland Studies Authority (QSA). It changed
its name in 2015 to Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA).
3 All names are pseudonyms.
4 Faircloughs intersecting concepts of Discourses, Genres
and Styles are productive for investigating teachers orientations to a range of approaches to teaching, not just to the
teaching of critical literacy.

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Jennifer Alford is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Cultural and Professional Learning in the Faculty of Education
at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Her research interests are critical discourse analysis
especially within ethnographic research in schools; critical literacy for EAL/D learners; English language teaching
pedagogy; and English language education policy.
Anita Jetnikoff is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Curriculum in the Faculty of Education at Queensland
University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Anita lectures in English curriculum studies. Her research interests
include creative pedagogies and media literacy in English, as well as teacher professional development and
identity, and language and literature studies.

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