Tung Vu, University at Albany
Canh Truong, Foreign Trade University

At a small scale, in this paper, the writers focus on civic engagement as a factor of social justice. With the aim to make more robust students’ awareness of their role with the community, we propose teaching activities incorporating civic engagement in classrooms by encouraging students to improve their critical thinking via extensive reading implementation. Furthermore, some issues relating to choosing suitable reading materials for learners will also be addressed.

Civic Engagement

Civic engagement in language teaching has recently attracted significant attention from both educators and researchers all over the world in order to fully describe the vital role of integrating social phenomena in education. Nonetheless, it is still a novice theme in Vietnam, especially in an EFL context. To define civic engagement, Preus et al. (2016) claim that it aims to develop citizens capable of making appropriate decisions in a wide range of social and political scenarios, ranging from voting, obeying laws, providing community service, supporting political campaigns, community organizing, and protesting. In order to make precise decisions given those demands of society, learners need to be equipped with sound background knowledge. To solve this problem, extensive reading (ER) is recommended as a suitable approach in encouraging students’ reading capacity and broadening knowledge.

Extensive Reading

Davis (1995) states that extensive reading (ER) is a way to give learners time, encourage them, let them read as many materials as possible in pleasure, within their levels and without washback effects. According to Maley (2009), extensive reading is understood as a method that motivates learners to read for their pleasure and information, with a vast number of materials and a wide range of topics with their own choice of books and a fast speed. The Extensive Reading Foundation Guide (2011) describes extensive reading as a teaching approach that helps students become better at the skill of reading rather than reading to study the language itself. This shows that the immediate focus of ER is on the content being read, rather than on language skills.

As a consequence, if learners take part in ER activity, they first gradually become more autonomous and critical with their understanding from various events, especially sensitive topics in civic engagement.Then, foremost, these students are likely to consolidate what they have known and extend it, to accumulate a thoughtful lens in a critical evaluation that finally leads to practical actions illustrating their concern with society.

In our opinions, to integrate effectively civic engagement into teaching extensive reading, some topics are necessary to help us seek a source of what Young (1990) entailed. According to Young (1990), social justice is an act which can be identified via five “facets” of oppression, such as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Thus, Young’s (1990) perspectives are helpful to ground the reading materials in the following section.

Extensive Reading Implementation

In our opinion, we strongly believe that ER plays a crucial role in nurturing the development of civic responsibility for students due to its positive effect in increasing their critical thinking on social events. Thus, the inquires of how to implement ER in EFL teaching context have driven the authors to present some proposed teaching activities that reach various English proficiency levels, from beginning to advanced learners. These suggestions were made based on the theoretical framework called Bloom’s taxonomy, which illustrates six major categories in the cognitive domain including knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It represents a cumulative hierarchy in the sense that the six categories of the cognitive process differ in their complexity to help determine the cognitive levels of reading materials or teaching activities posed by teachers.

Despite the heterogeneity of students’ English proficiency among participants, all the teaching activities are supposed to boost students’ critical thinking as the highest level in Bloom’s taxonomy. However, we suggest that teachers should be concerned with different learning characteristics in each level in order to scaffold suitable reading materials and teaching activities, because the ability to read in a foreign language presents a daunting challenge to the language learner. To make it manageable, we classify activities for three groups of learners, namely A2 (beginning), B1 (intermediate), and C1 (advanced) based on CEFR, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001).

For beginners. At this stage, because learners hold a limited source of vocabulary, teachers are advised to employ a lot of reading materials which enable learners to familiarize themselves with various common issues of social justice, but at a surface level, which requires them to have short responses with current vocabularies and sentence-making competences. Furthermore, in order to help them advance their understanding of these topics, teachers can undertake furthering discussions with a series of single questions (e.g. Yes/No questions, or “Why”-questions). Importantly, students should not be put under stress regarding using a high level of language words and structures. For example, selected texts should include high-frequency vocabulary. In terms of teaching activities, teachers are advised to design their teaching plans based on Bloom’s taxonomy, which starts fromremembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating. For beginner students, students should be instructed on the first two levels of, remembering knowledge and understanding the reading. Some activities that teachers may find useful are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Recommended Teaching Activities and Reading Materials for Beginners

For intermediate and advanced learners. From our teaching experience, we have to admit that distinguishing intermediate and advanced learners is itself a challenge for educators and instructors due to the similarity in learning characteristics that they share. However, advanced students are autonomous language learners, which means they can progress on their own without a teacher or structured method, through sheer immersion, while intermediate learners still require scaffolding from a teacher, a book, or any structured learning system (Leyre, 2017). Nonetheless, no matter how these two levels are different, they still share the similar point of focusing on improving students’ high level of thinking, which can be found at the highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy as synthesis and evaluation. As a result, learners can connect what they learn and their background knowledge, then turn them into practical actions. In terms of reading materials, all topics referring to civic engagement are appropriate for these two levels that can be reached via the following websites.

Table 2. Recommended Teaching Activities and Reading Materials for Intermediate and Advanced Learners

In short, there are various sources for reading materials and teaching activities to help boost students’ concern for social justice and to link their academic knowledge with reality practices.

Conclusion

All in all, this very handy proposal for ER implementation in encouraging students to cultivate sound reading on civic engagement hopes to assist teachers and educators maximize their teaching purposes. It is obvious that social justice is an abstract phenomenon, and the initial aims of any educator are enhancing their students’ ability in turning their knowledge into actions. This involves solving problems facing society. However, ER is a long process and teachers are supposed to be flexible in manifesting their teaching plans to reach their targets.

References

Adams, M., Bell, L. A., & Griffin, P. (2007). Teaching for diversity and social justice. Routledge.

Extensive Reading Foundation. (2011). The Extensive Reading Foundation’s guide to extensive reading. https://erfoundation.org/guide/ERF_Guide.pdf

Ferlazzo, Larry. (2008, July 1). The best teacher resource sites for social justice issues.

Larry Ferlazzo’s websites of the day. https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/07/01/the-best-teacher-resource-sites-for-social-justice-issues/

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2

Preus, B., Payne, R., Wick, C., & Glomski, E. (2016). Listening to the voices of civically engaged high school students. The High School Journal, 100(1), 66–84.

Sheu, S. P.-H. (2004). Effects of extensive reading on learners’ reading ability development. Journal of National Taipei Teachers College, 17(2), 213–228. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Effects-of-Extensive-Reading-on-Learners%27-Sheu/04a3e7b1f3512edac7006df34cf602bb424101cc

Slattery, P. (1995). Curriculum development in the postmodern era. Garland.

Tarman, B., & Kuran, B. (2015). Examination of the cognitive level of questions in social studies textbooks and the views of teachers based on Bloom’s taxonomy. Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice, 15(1): 213-222. https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2015.1.2625

Young, Iris Marion. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.

Yu, V. W. S. (1999). Promoting second language development and reading habits through an extensive reading scheme. In Y. M. Cheah & S. M. Ng (Eds.), Language instructional issues in Asian classrooms (pp. 59-74). International Development in Asia Committee, International Reading Association.

Canh Truong’s main research interests are issues of English teaching methodology, the theory of multiple intelligences in English teaching, and learner autonomy.