• Reading with intention, involves interaction between the reader and the text.

• Critical reading happens before the reader engages with the text. Most of the text is not completely factual. Critical readers should be able to recognise that reading is not in a vacuum.

• Critical readers are aware of the strategies they could use to read critically.

• Critical reading is not skimming.

• Students' ability and interest in reading might be influenced by what they were taught based on the Sec School exams.

• looking beyond what is being said, to probe at the underlying meaning conveyed by the author. This can be done through examining its nuances, and looking at what the author's purpose might be

  
  

  More and less of

• [more] students past and present struggle with critical reading - it's not a new problem, but it's getting more difficult for students to pick up even something short like news articles. 1) Student profile: not readers, used to short form pieces of reading on social media, watching videos rather than reading. 2) There is also an interest gap between teachers and students. 3) Big range of ability levels in classes also is a challenge, as we slow down the activity. We want to find ways to motivate or interest students

• [more] getting students involved in promoting reading - reading programmes, articles curated by a council of GP reps, incentives to promote reading

• [less?] varying levels of success with explicit teaching, of using frameworks like Paul's wheel of reasoning, or versions of this. Students find this laborious and boring. HOWEVER, when students acquire a disposition of using these skills, they begin to enjoy reading more

• using comprehension passages as a way to model critical reading, because students approach it functionally. Slow reading through the comprehension, but students may not appreciate it for its own sake

• understand the text,

• what may be not in the text

• arguments of the author's.

• Context of the author's / and beyond

• Key ideas

• making connections to different areas

• connections to prior knowledge.

what can we do more/less

• do more comparing students' annotations?

• understanding expressions, meanings?

• questioning authors' assumptions?

• cut down on exam focus - exam focus critical reading

• need to move beyond reading BUT focusing on the CRITICAL part - what is literal/ beyond the text

• getting students to come up with the questions themselves

• Asking questions about the text, evaluating the use of persuasive words or vocabulary and drawing meaning from these words.

• Analysing syntax and diction to probe deeper about the intentions of the author.

• Big picture approach: understanding the intent of the text (e.g. for an argumentative or persuasive piece) as well as active reading, questioning and interrogating the text rather than simply letting the ideas flow into their minds [passively]

• Metacognition

• Put yourself in the mindset of a questioner -- thinking about the validity and reliability of information shared

• Perspective-taking --> questioning the writer's argument but also the argument of different stakeholders

• Engaging in guesswork and having these questions resolved by reading through the text

• Linking the text to their prior knowledge

• Students tend to look at each paragraph in isolation as they answer comprehension questions -- need to focus on linking linguistic choices to the BIG PICTURE meaning of the text.

b) What can we do more of and less of to meet students' learning needs in critical reading?

• Looking at comprehension texts in totality rather than reading paragraphs in isolation --> Big picture approach

• Essays are also highly paragraph-based (e.g. students contradict themselves across paragraphs) --> need to work on connecting ideas across a text. Need to show students how each paragraph has its own function to carry the message of the main text.

• Focus less on getting students to provide the correct answer, but instead, have them understand + explain why their answer is wrong in the first place --> probing the reasons why they provided a particular response + having them explicitly verbalise their answers and make sense of them (especially during consultations)

• Focus more on questioning arguments rather than questioning the entire text --> make thinking more visible

• Pose more questions to students and give them space to think (and even make mistakes!) when reading a text

• Give guiding questions when reading a text

• Sensitizing them to different semantic levels (locution, illocution, perlocution) to generate meaning.

• While reading a text, invite students to write questions to the author to respond to arguments presented.

• Constraints of classroom -- can be quite difficult to teach critical reading. Perhaps, we can make critical reading a way of life, by encouraging them to carry out critical reading independently. e.g. Provide different routines (different layers of meaning, writing down questions) --> foster a sense of self-directed learning