Critical Literacy in the subject Norwegian

How students (13–14 years) read and evaluate multimodal commercial texts

Abstract

This article presents findings from a survey mapping critical reading and evaluation in the subject Norwegian (L1), including 228 Norwegian students (13–14 years old). The study identifies what kinds of understandings these students have of critical reading, as well as how the students evaluate and explain their readings of multimodal commercial texts. A main finding is that an understanding of critical reading as evaluating the credibility of sources seems to be most frequent among the students. The students in this study did only to a small extent associate critical literacy with textual analysis. Thus, the majority of the students have a reasonable, but still limited understanding of what it means to approach a text in a critical way. Another main finding is that evaluation of multimodal commercial texts seems to be challenging for some of the students. The answers indicate that a considerable part of the students did not pay enough attention to the visual information when evaluating commercial texts. A larger number of the students were able to problematize the commercial intention of the texts when they were encouraged to read and analyze the texts more closely. These findings identify that the current understanding of critical literacy in the subject Norwegian could be expanded. The study calls for further research and development of new and more textual oriented learning methods for critical literacy in lower secondary schooling.