Teachers of reading and writing have been getting a lot of criticism recently, mostly derived from studies showing that students and the population at large lack essential literacy skills to be successful. The move to multimodal literacy only complicates the problems already present. While some new skills are needed in order to engage in…

If Friedman is right that the world is "flat," we need to understand the linguistic implications of that claim. In this increasingly flat world, classical critical literacy is both urgently needed and poorly understood from a linguistic perspective. Three claims based on research on reading can improve both the understanding of the common…

Critical literacy in the new century will draw on critical literacy as it has been known in centuries past and will continue to draw on basic cognitive mechanisms that make the feat of literacy possible at all. These mechanisms include both essential mental abilities like identification and categorization. The ability o analyze, synthesize, and…