Creating a Book Club with a Critical Approach to Foster Literacy Practices

Abstract

This paper reports the pedagogical experience of creating a book club to foster the reading of short stories from a critical literacy perspective at a high school in Bogotá, Colombia. The Book Club arose as an after-school program where students, who were interested in the proposal, were free to join. First, the paper presents the fundamental concepts that guided the implementation. Then, it describes the central elements of the pedagogical experience: context, curricular platform, procedures, and activities. The final discussion centers on the role of a critical literacy approach that encouraged participants to go beyond concerns about the grammatical and linguistic aspects of the foreign language to focus on meaning-making. Also, to concentrate on responding and transacting with the texts while engaging in dialogic interactions that allowed them to share background knowledge, life experiences, social and individual issues of their realities and interests, and most importantly, enjoy the act of reading in a foreign language as it was seen as a social-situated practice.