Fostering EFL pre-service Teacher's Critical Media Literacy and Critical Thinking in online Environment at a Public University in Montería - Cordoba

Abstract

This paper presents an action research case study on the significance of critical media literacy and critical thinking in online environments. The main objective was to foster pre-service EFL teachers’ critical thinking and media literacy skills using online tools at a public university in Colombia. The participants were four pre-service teachers from different municipalities of the department of Cordoba. To gather the data, artifacts, students’ written and oral production, lesson plans produced by the participants, and an open-ended questionnaire were employed. To analyze the results, two frameworks designed by the research team were used to check participant’s development of critical thinking and media literacy development. The critical thinking framework sought to check hints of critical thinking evidence on preservice teacher’s development of tasks such as before and after an initial discussion, while the media literacy framework was used to check the media literacy development that participants showed in the media literacy tasks such as the individual and group advertisement analysis. The results demonstrated that the suggested pedagogical proposal could improve preservice- teacher’s critical thinking and media literacy skills, and also that these two aforementioned skills can work together.