Foreign language students’ views on FL and critical literacies

Abstract

This study reports on the journal entries written by undergraduate students (N = 42) after participating in Spanish as a foreign language classes with a critical pedagogy orientation which unfolded from the exploration of homophobia in a poem by Luis Cernuda. Students were requested to express their views on how the lessons had impacted their FL competence and critical literacies. The teaching proposal was held to successfully activate an increased awareness of the issue of social justice, empathy towards marginalized groups, and a desire to take social action. As for perceived benefits in FL literacy, while learners confirmed that lessons were useful for enhancing language skills and linguistic competence, they also highlighted issues which to date had remained uninformed in critical pedagogy (CP) research: a demand for more explicit instruction of grammatical forms, and the role in critical FL pedagogy of specific FL methodological principles such as the dynamism or the student-centredness of the lessons.

Keywords:

• FL critical pedagogy
• Spanish as a foreign language
• student belief
• linguistic competence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A very active group of poets who during the 1920s and until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 undertook one of the most original and powerful renovations of Spanish lyrical language.

Additional information

Funding

This work was written as part of the research project ‘Queer Temporalities in Contemporary Anglophone Culture (Literature, Cinema and Video Games)’ funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities [grant number PGC2018-095393-B-I00].

Notes on contributors

Pedro Antonio Férez Mora

Pedro Antonio Férez Mora is a lecturer at the Department of Didactics of Foreign Languages and Their Literatures at the University of Murcia. His research interests include queer theory, L2 pedagogy, critical applied linguistics and CLIL.

Yvette Coyle

Yvette Coyle is a lecturer at the Department of Didactics of Foreign Languages and Their Literatures at the University of Murcia. Her research interests include the teaching/learning potential of writing for EFL, genre pedagogy and L2 pedagogy.

Ángela Dorado Otero

Ángela Dorado Otero works on Iberian and Latin American Studies, across countries, periods and genres, and in a comparative fashion, with a particular interest in contemporary studies, cultural memory, dictatorship and cultural production and discourses of gender and sexuality.