Orientations to critical literacy for English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) learners: a case study of four teachers of senior English.

Alford, Jennifer ; Jetnikoff, Anita

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 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 family-based 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. 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 (QBSSSS (2)), 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 Green's 3D model (in Nixon, 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 ... They've telescoped all sorts of things in. They've lost the ESL-ness of it. It's just not ESL; it's 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 School (3) (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 (17-28 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.

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

Fairclough's (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 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 it's 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 can't say this without using the critical language ... Privileging, marginalising, silencing. I think it's 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 it's 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.

This situation has been represented in a particular way and it could have been represented--the situation could have been represented much more negatively, couldn't 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 Fair-clough (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, 'couldn't it?' which has a declarative effect (Genres), and a causal relationship over the course of her talk (Styles) between representations that arise from an author's 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, you're 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: You're unwanted.

Margot: Good. Thank you.

Female student: That's how--forget us.

Margot: You feel--and this is the kind of stuff you can be putting into your report. So we'll start making some notes. You feel left out. So people who are not represented--that's an excellent, that's a fantastic point you feel left out. You feel that you don't 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 can't 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.

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 doesn't belong in the group--you are outside the group. ... If you're engaged in something--engaged in something, you are involved. Okay, so if you are disengaged it means that you are not involved. So it's 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: We're talking the community. We're 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.

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 OMITTED]

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 Fairclough's (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.

Celia: [addressing the class] So, the genre is persuasive. It's a persuasive text. You're 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 you've got a particular purpose. Now you choose who you want to be. You can be a person an historical person that's achieved great things, or you can be an imaginary person. You can make something up. But you've 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 Celia's 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 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 Corporation's Race Around the World documentary series (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 1997-1998). The subject matter of the documentaries included Chinese panda research and cultural representations within Disneyland in an attempt to make 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 OMITTED]

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 4-6 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 doesn't 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 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.

Jennifer Alford and Anita Jetnikoff

Queensland University of Technology

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) Fairclough's 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.

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

Aspect of social practice      Linguistic markers

Representation: Ways of        Elements of transitivity (Halliday,
representing aspects of the    1978)--participants (who or what is
world through language         acting) and processes (how are they
(e.g., critical literacy as    acting); themes and associated lexical
a concept in this study) =     items; and metaphor.
Discourses.

Action: Ways of acting/        Dominant semantic-grammatical
interacting within a social    relations between sentences and
event which includes           clauses; higher-level semantic
enacting social relations      relations over long stretches of text;
(e.g., ways of doing           predominant grammatical moods
critical literacy teaching)    (declarative, imperative or
= Genres.                      interrogative)?

Identification: Ways of        Modality (commitment to 'truth'//
being/identifying with some    i.e., epistemic modalities) and
position; indicates degree     necessity/obligation (deontic
of commitment and judgement    modalities); evaluation (e.g., through
of something (in this case     the use of adjectives or qualifiers);
critical literacy) = Styles.   and assumed values.

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        This fails to recognise that
                                difference fundamentally affects
                                pathways to access and involves
                                issues of history, identity and
                                value.

Access without design           This maintains and reifies dominant
                                forms without considering how they
                                can be transformed.

Diversity without domination    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

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     Texts were deconstructed in detail by Riva
allows the exclusionary    and Lucas at Riverdale High, e.g., YouTube
force of dominant          documentaries and by Margot at Beacon High
discourses to be           through media texts, to show how they are
challenged and             invested with power through semiotic
potentially dissipated.    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            Following critical interrogation of media
diversity invites          texts, students at Beacon High created
contestation and change    their own thesis about media portrayal of a
brought about by           particular group in society, for example,
alternative                refugees or youth, and then wrote an
perspectives/              investigative report following a set model.
discourses/languages/      In Year 12 at Beacon High, students
literacies.                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     Students gained an understanding of how
allows for creative        power is exercised through semiotic choices
reconstruction based on    in texts but were not encouraged to
an understanding of        redesign/transform the models in any way
power. Access with         though the potential was there in Celia's
domination provides a      Year 12 political speech task which as a
view of texts and          hortatory text advocates change to the
discourses as              status quo. There was a pervasive view
reproducible but always    among the four teachers that powerful
invested with power.       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.,
                           Disneyland's 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      There was limited opportunity to bring
recognises that learners   different histories, identities and values
bring different            to text production is evident--except in
histories, identities      Year 11 at Riverdale with the analytical
and values to text         essay where students produced an essay in a
production.                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   There was some use of Design elements in
diverse learners the       Celia's Year 12 speech writing task.
chance to transform        However, the students did not engage in
dominant texts using       transforming dominant texts using multiple
multiple sign systems.     sign systems.

Diversity with             At Beacon High, the students were able to
domination celebrates      draw on their own histories and
difference but             perspectives to create a thesis for their
recognises that it is      investigative report. Their own languages
structured in dominance    and 'out of school literacies, however,
and can be challenged.     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      There was little scope for including
allows difference to be    aspects of diversity, such as other
brought into dominant      languages and literate practices, as
language forms.            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.

Diversity with design      The students in Celia's Year 12 class were
realises the potential     able to draw on their own ideas and
diversity offers in        positions to write their hortatory
reconstructing texts.      political speech. However, they did not
Design with domination     engage in transforming dominant texts using
provides understanding     multiple sign systems as a resource. The
of how dominant            students did not engage in transforming
practices are              dominant texts using deconstruction or
perpetuated and how they   multiple sign systems.
can be transformed.

Design with access         The students did not engage in transforming
creates potential for      dominant texts using access to multiple
new forms to be accepted   sign systems to create new forms.
by/as dominant
practices.

Design with diversity      The students in Celia's Year 12 class were
provides opportunity to    able to draw on their own ideas,
draw on difference as a    experiences and positions to write their
resource for design.       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.