Investigating Teachers’ Integration of Critical Pedagogical Perspectives in Teaching Four Basic English Skills

Abstract

The issue of incorporating critical pedagogical (CP) perspectives in ELT classroom has been addressed in the literature, but how English language teachers and educators in Indonesia incorporate them into their lessons have not been well documented. Therefore, this study aims to investigate to what extent the CP perspectives have been integrated within the learning process to teach four basic English skills, regardless of teachers’ familiarity with CP. Two in-service English teachers from a private Christian-based junior high school in Salatiga were asked to fill the questionnaire and were interviewed. Three classroom observations were conducted to explore the realization of the CP practice. The data collected was classified based on the eleven components of critical language pedagogy proposed by Crookes (2013). The results showed that as students’ wholeness was acknowledged, the learning process integrated cultural and critical content to teach a particular language feature. The tasks given during the learning process were organized in a way that met the students’ need. During the learning process, the data showed a great deal of the inclusion of spiritual values as a way of demonstrating the students’ criticality.