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Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences

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ISSN: 2308-0876

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Promoting Students Critical Literacy through the Use of Popular Culture Texts in the Formal Language Classroom

Polyxeni Manoli

Open access

This study points out the need to integrate popular culture texts into formal language teaching and suggests some pedagogical applications based on various research findings. In particular, it discusses that the inauguration of the digital era, the important role that the mass media play in our contemporary lives, the emphasis on new kinds of literacies, Multiliteracies, attributing importance to the various semiotic modes of meaning making, have contributed to the emergence of texts, such as comics, texts coming from magazines, newspaper, television movies and series, advertisements, posters, and social media; these kinds of texts constitute an integral part of students’ lives and tend to recycle the prevalent social ideologies. Allowing for the dynamic, semiotic and constantly changing social context, it is held that the school should develop students’ critical literacy in terms of the dominant sociolinguistic representations that are constructed in the popular culture texts, acknowledging, though, that the implementation of critical literacy programmes at school is a complex and multidimensional process requiring the cultivation of an open and exploratory learning environment, teachers’ and parents’ education.

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In-Text Citation: (Manoli, 2019)
To Cite this Article: Manoli, P. (2019). Promoting students’ critical literacy through the use of popular culture texts in the formal language classroom. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 7(1), 47–56.