ABSTRACT
This chapter points out some definitions of literacy and critical literacy in the wider context of critical pedagogy. It explores how language awareness supports critical literacy: more particularly what kinds of linguistic tools enhance the teaching of critical literacy in a range of contexts. Reading and writing clearly remain concrete specific activities within a broad literacy paradigm and it is helpful in a teaching context to talk more particularly of 'critical reading' and 'critical writing'. The chapter argues that there is a continuum rather than a disjuncture between the weaker and the strong view of criticality, and that traditional critical thinking needs to play its part in the more specifically political project of critical literacy. Versions of critical literacy drawing on the work of Foucault can appear to position human subjects as "powerless, in the grip of discourses they are barely aware of and as relatively lacking in agency".
