Critical Reading in Everyday Life

In this world, where schools are becoming more technologically dependent, it is necessary for students to be able to read websites, which are multimodal in nature. As mentioned by Luke, reading is not a universal skill that only comprises of phonics, phonetics and denotative meaning but it also encompasses the underlying meaning or connotative meaning as well as the social practice that is embedded within the text. Hence, we will be analyzing the main page of a Singapore secondary school website that students need to navigate often in order to participate in the e-resources provided by the school.

Coding competence:
As mentioned by Luke, we need to have adequate knowledge of the alphabet, grapheme phoneme relationships, left-to-right directionality that is necessary for reading. In the case of reading this website, left-to-right and top-to-bottom directionality is necessary to go through all the features available on the website. We need to know the words that are used to represent the links so that they will know where and which links to click on in order to find out further information or to access other associated websites.

Semantic competence:
We have been exposed to a multi array of websites as information source and would have been familiar with the way a website is structured – how to differentiate a link from a text and so forth. It demands us to be able to comprehend the design and layout of the design in order to be able to make decisions on where they should go and read. In navigating this website, we would also need prior knowledge on the different links available such as the asknlearn, acelearn and so forth to make sense of what it would entail and whether it is meaningful to us..

Pragmatic competence:
We need to know the purpose of going to the website and the links that would direct them to their aim. Not only that, there are also certain rules that have been embedded within the website, for example, the quick access have been separated into categories and they have to select the category that is befitting to our position. We also need to know the rules of being able to access the associated websites by ensuring that we have the userid and password to some of the other websites.

Critical competence:
By critical competence, Luke refers to “the development of a meta-language for talking about how texts code cultural ideologies, and how they position readers in subtle and often quite exploitative ways”. Students then need to know how they are constructed as model readers and the power relations that are subtly projected in the text. Based on the images used, it seems that the school is foregrounding the students as its main participants. However, upon closer analysis of the picture, only students belonging to a certain group or CCA – such as the prefects and the band were shown. The news update on the right hand focuses on the School Excellence Award. The use of language in the welcome message also highlights their progress and accomplishment.
What is then the ideology behind these emphases?
One of the ideology could probably be that in order for the school to achieve all this, its students would have to play their part in achieving the best that they possibly can. In a way, the school is painting a picture of the kind of students that it requires for the school to excel.
In terms of power relation, the tagline of the school, “Your potential, Our purpose” gives the impression that students are in power. However, the rest of the website doesn’t really give students much power because they are all decided by the makers of the website or school authorities, except for the visuals that focuses on students.

Approaches

In order to raise awareness of the ideology in the text, we will be drawing on Kress’ (1987) questions that can be used to asked on any text:

1) Why is the topic being written?
2) How is the topic being written about?
3) What other ways of writing about the topic are there?

Firstly, we began the lesson by asking students other ways for the same message to be written in. This will allow students to see that different genres are available to choose from. The teacher will then ask students on the genre of the message in which the author has chosen. Students will then be asked to think of the purpose of the message. The purpose of the text is important, as it will determine the content of the message. It will show how the author has interpreted the topic based on the content of the message.

In order to highlight to students the language used to convey the message, teacher should ask questions to help students understand. The choice of action words, and the positioning of the school in the text are ways in which the author has chosen to send his message across. Students will be able to see that these choices influence the way the message is constructed. By replacing the structure or changing the action words used may not be able to create the same impact.

Once students are aware of the ideology behind the message, get students to rewrite the message in a different genre. Student will then be able to relate to the first question where author has chosen to write in an informative ways instead of other genre such as recount. This will allow students to realize the reason for the author’s choice of genre to convey the message.