Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom

Book excerpt: This book examines how critical literacy pedagogy has been implemented in a classroom through a year-long collaboration between the author (a researcher) and an EAP teacher. It details the teacher's introduction to functional grammar and accompanying critical literacy approaches to EAP, and her growing critical language and discourse awareness of power and meaning making in the classroom. The book traces her evolving classroom practices and addresses how powerful discourses in social circulation found their way into the classroom via the curriculum materials the students encountered. The main themes of the book are threefold: narrowing the divide between critically-oriented researchers and practitioners; how critical literacy is actually implemented in a teacher's classroom; and how people (students and the teacher) engage in and with the representations and discourses of the everyday world that include neoliberal globalization, racial and cultural identities, and consumerism. It will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners for the ethnographic and pedagogical issues it raises as well as its accessible theoretical frameworks illustrated by relevant classroom interactional data, mediated, multimodal and critical discourse analysis.