Exploring critical media literacy with culturally and linguistically diverse youth in Australia: recontextualisation of school learning in home environments

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on an instrumental case study exploring what migrant and refugee-background youth in Australia make of the critical media literacy they learn in school, and what critical media practices they use out of school. It addresses the perennial question of the relationship between school literacy learning and everyday literate lives, paying deliberate attention to the experiences of youth whose diversity is underrepresented in research. Interviews with two English teachers and focus groups with culturally and linguistically diverse Year 10 students were analysed using content analysis and the concept of recontextualization. Findings are that these youth see significant value in their critical literacy learning at school, and they report utilising the types of critical reading/viewing skills they experience at school but for different purposes. They frequently use five main strategies for critical reading/viewing out of school: 1. using awareness of myriad multimodal semiotic features to examine representations of products and information; 2. evaluating trustworthiness; 3. fact checking; 4. doing further research; 5. identifying attempts at positioning. This research brings in-school and out-of-school domains together to understand the connections between critical literacy practices undertaken in school, and those reshaped by immigrant youth, who are still learning English, out of school.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical literacy
• CALD learners
• social media
• recontextualisation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council and the Queensland Department of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data is not available under ethical clearance.

Ethical statement

Full ethical clearance was obtained to conduct this research. Griffith University Ethics no. 2023–303.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE210101782].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Alford

Jennifer Alford is Associate Professor in the Griffith Institute of Education Research, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. She has been a teacher educator/researcher for 22 years in English as an additional language, literacy, and intercultural studies. She is a current Australian Research Council fellow investigating critical literacy with migrant and refugee-background youth. Her book Critical Literacy with adolescent English language learners: Exploring global policy and practice was published by Routledge in 2021; and she is co-editor of The Handbook of Critical Literacies (Routledge, 2022).