Lahcen Ghechi

Department of English, Faculty of Letters, University of Sidi , Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Sais Fes, MOROCCO

Critical reading or how to combat reader illiteracy in hierarchical societies

The great majority of students at the English Department in the Faculty of Letters in Morocco are incapable of engaging in constructive, independent and critical reading activities. They lack critical thinking abilities that are necessary for meaning interpretation and creation in ‘mother’ or foreign language texts. In other words, they are ‘illiterate readers’. To verify the above observation, 64 Second Year students at the English Department in the Faculty of Letters in Fez were assigned an argumentative text to read and answer various structured questions about the text based on their reading. Among other results, only 6.25% of them correctly interpreted the text as being argumentative. That is, most students could not believe that the text was an attempt to refute certain claims! The results of the study confirm the hypothesis that ‘reader illiteracy’ is to be looked for, not only in the way reading courses are administered at the university, but particularly in specific structures in the Moroccan society and culture, and in the structures of Arabic discourse. The paper concludes that because Moroccan students are socialized in a highly hierarchical society and culture where they are encouraged to ‘listen’ and ‘know’ rather than also ‘understand’ and ‘query’, and schooled in institutions where the teacher and the book are the only ultimate sources of knowledge, they tend to develop reading habits that emphasize and limit the reading activity to mere recognition of information. The paper proposes a practical discourse analytical heuristic, grounded in systemic functional linguistics (that can be understood by both teachers and students) to draw the students’ awareness to the causes and consequences of student inability to read critically. It also proposes a course and a teaching method that can help students (mostly in developing countries) to react effectively to sets of discourse practices embedded in the social and cultural contexts where the reading material is produced. In other words, it proposes a course which has for its main objective to combat reader illiteracy. Finally, an outline of a larger scale research project to further examine these findings is presented. The research intends to cover a sample of four universities and 14 departments. Its results will be used as a contribution to the pedagogical reform which is currently underway in Morocco and will consist of sets of structured recommendations to enhance ‘reader literacy’ in elementary and secondary schools as well as in universities.