Critical Literacy: The Four Resources Model

​Critical Literacy:

The Four Resources Model​

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​Learning Objectives

In this lecture, you will:

• Discuss the Four Resources Model

• Explain how the Four Resources Model can be applied by ESL teachers

• ​Apply the Four Resources Model to analyse a text of your choice

• Evaluate how the Four Resources Model help to develop critical literacy

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​"...only the necessary components of literacy success can be documented; everything that a member of our culture can take from or bring to a written text can never be pre-specified, any more than can everything that a culture demands or expects from its members in their dealings with written text. Here therefore we will argue for the necessary status of four components of success, based on our perceptions of what our culture expects, here and now, from people in their management of text."

...we want to direct attention away from the question of 'which method affords adequate literacy?' toward the larger and necessarily prior question of 'which aspects of literacy, or indeed which "literacies" are offered or emphasised by various programs?'

​...This issue thus becomes not whether a 'basic skills, a 'communicative, or a 'critical' approach to literacy instruction is most appropriate or necessary, but rather that each of these general families of approaches displays and emphasises particular forms of literacy, such that no single one will, of itself, fully enable students to use texts effectively, in their own individual and collective interests, across a range of discourses, texts and tasks." (Freebody & Luke, 1990)

The Four Resources Model

​1990

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Tasks

In groups of 6:

1. Discuss one of the roles​ that a successful literate performer play according to the Four Resources Model

2. ​Explain how an ESL teacher can teach the role to his/her students

​You will share your findings in the next class.

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Teaching Literacy (Freebody & Luke, 2003)

The basic proposition of the ‘four roles’ model is that effective literacy in complex print and multimediated societies requires a broad and flexible repertoire of practices. This repertoire we have characterized as a set of ‘roles’, later ‘practices’, that participants in literacy events are able to use or ‘resource’. These are:​

• breaking the code of texts: recognising and using the fundamental features and architecture of written texts including: alphabet, sounds in words, spelling, punctuation, conventions and patterns of sentence structure,  page layout, directionality and text formatting

• participating in the meanings of text:  understanding and composing meaningful written, visual and spoken texts in ways that connect texts’ meaning systems to peoples’ available knowledges and experiences of other cultural discourses, texts and meaning systems, and the relevant and purposeful inferences that can be drawn from these connections

Teaching Literacy (Freebody & Luke, 2003)

• using texts functionally: traversing and negotiating the social relations around texts; knowing about and acting on the different cultural and social functions that various texts perform both inside and outside school and knowing that these functions shape the way texts are structured, their tone, their degree of formality and their sequence of components, and the courses of social action they can accomplish with particular texts

• critically analysing and transforming texts: understanding and acting on the knowledge that texts are not transparent windows on the world, that they are not ideologically natural or neutral, that they represent particular views and silence others, influence people's ideas; and that their designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways

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Multiple Choice

How do I crack this text?

How does the text work?

What do I know about texts like this one that might help me crack the code?

Is there more than one semiotic system operating here? If so, how do they relate to one another?

What are the codes and conventions employed in the text?

How do the different parts of the text relate to one another? (e.g. layout and organisation

of the text)

The questions above could be used to support.............

• code breaker practices

• meaning maker practices

• text user practices

• text analyst practices

Multiple Choice

How have you been shaped by this text?

What kind of person(s), with what interests, attitudes, values and beliefs, produced this text?

What are the origins of the text?

What is the producer of this text trying to make you believe or do?

What beliefs and positions are dominant in, or absent from, the text?

Who has been marginalised or silenced by the text?

What do you think about the way this text presents these ideas and what alternatives are there?

Having engaged with the text, what actions are you going to take?

The questions above could be used to support.............

• code breaker practices

• meaning maker practices

• text user practices

• text analyst practices

Multiple Choice

What is the purpose of this text and what is my purpose in using it?

How have the uses and purposes of this text shaped its production?

What should I do with this text in this context?

What could others do with this text?

The questions above could be used to support.............

• code breaker practices

• meaning maker practices

• text user practices

• text analyst practices

Multiple Choice

How will the purpose and context for my reading influence my meaning making?

What social, cultural, literate and technological resources do I have that might help me make meaning of this text?

How are the ideas in this text sequenced and connected and how does this affect the way I make meaning?

What are the other possible meanings and readings of this text?

The questions above could be used to support.............

• code breaker practices

• meaning maker practices

• text user practices

• text analyst practices

Tasks

In groups of 4:

1. Select any text and use the Four Resources Model to engage with the text.

2. Evaluate how the Four Resources Model help to develop critical literacy.

​You will present your discussion in Week 7.

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