Critical Literacy-Based Instruction In Teaching Reading: Insights And Challenges

Teaching reading in the Indonesian educational system still focuses only on the comprehension and vocabulary exercises and does not encourage learners to become critical thinkers in reading the text. Critical literacy-based instruction is a critical thinking development technique that helps students become active meaning-makers. This study investigated teachers’ understanding and challenges on critical literacy-based instruction in teaching reading. In this case study, the research questionnaire and interview were used as instruments of data collection. The data collected from the respondents were gathered together to be analyzed using qualitative analysis of interactive models. The result of this study shows that some teachers were in misconception about critical literacy. They are also difficult to differentiate the concept of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and critical literacy. Besides, they face several obstacles and challenges in implementing critical literacy-based instruction in teaching reading. Mostly, when they asked students to evaluate multiple texts to study how the story changes when told from different perspectives, read from a resistant perspective, and produce counter texts. Enhancing students’ critical thinking ability in reading can be approached from three perspectives; critical thinking, critical pedagogy, and critical literacy. This study only focused on critical literacy in teaching reading. This study will be preliminary inputs for the readers or other researchers to further study in a similar research area with different interests.