Developing College Students’ Critical Literacy in Blended Learning

• Main Authors: CHEN, YEN-YIN, 陳彥穎
• Other Authors: YANG, YU-FEN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/cfp632

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 107 === Unlike traditional higher education that inculcates students with mainstream value, this study aimed to investigate how college students’ critical literacy was developed under blended instruction with a big on-site class and one-on-one online tutoring. A sample of 37 Taiwanese college students who studied English as a Foreign Language (EFL) voluntarily participated in learning and discussing global issues. Reflective journals, a semi-structured interview, and oral log files of the teacher-student interaction were collected and analyzed by content analysis with Ada’s critical literacy phases. The results reveal that the blended instruction was identified by the students as an effective practice to develop critical literacy. First, the students started to form social connections online with different native speaking English teachers, which made learning global issues meaningful by enabling them to construct new knowledge based on their experiences. Second, the students not only described who did what at a certain time and further related things to their personal experiences. In doing so, they were using their ability to analyze with reason the situations they were talking about and in the end they gave suggestions or solutions. All this indicated the students have developed critical literacy in the process of the blended instruction. Finally, the students were able to distinguish just behaviors from unjust ones for a better world in the future. This study suggested that blended instruction of critical pedagogy fostered college students’ critical thinking, facilitated them to identify social justice, and was effective according to the effective teaching criteria.