FROM COMPREHENSION TO CRITIQUING

ELREEN ANN P. GRAN

There is a need to move students from merely comprehending what they read, to critiquing, or teaching them to question what they read.

We assign our students some readings along with written assignments – but we oftentimes just ask them to summarize what they have read.

We educators now have to apply critical literacy so that students can create their own responses to media or text, and to the author or the narrator.

We can move students into reading critically once we have determined that they are past decoding and have comprehended a text. Critical reading means analyzing a book, song lyrics, a commercial, or a poem by first thinking about the context and purpose that informed the text.

We can then ask these: What do we know about the author or narrator? Why have they selected this topic? What’s the context and purpose? And then we can move on to asking who gains or benefits from the stance or perspective and who loses? Whose voice is excluded? Who is left out of the story— whose perspective or experiences?

We should encourage students to be critical of the messages, which may have been accepted as truth but deserves questioning. Through this, we can help them develop their ability to voice their views beyond the classroom walls.

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The author is Secondary School Teacher I at Basa Air Base National High School