Bridging the gap between theory and practice in critical pedagogy

Larson (2014) defines CP as a learner-centered approach to education that is focused on problem posing in which the students engage in critical dialogue. This approach has the aim of improving social justice with an emphasis on action (p. 123). Surveying the theoretical aspect of critical pedagogy has been on the march; however, the practical aspect seems to be marginalized. To address this gap, the present study strived to account for applying critical pedagogy instruction which was adopted from Abednia (2015). To this end, 60 upper-intermediate EFL students were assigned to groups of experimental and control. The participants of the study were homogenized in terms of their listening proficiency and critical pedagogy awareness. Afterwards, both groups took IELTS listening sample test as pretest. Then, the experimental group was given critical pedagogy instruction for their listening. The control group, on the other hand, was taught using banking method. After fifteen-session instruction, both groups took another IELTS listening sample test as posttest. Additionally, the experimental group was asked to write reflective journal throughout the instruction. Moreover, a non-participant observer was asked to observe the critical pedagogy based class and reports about how she perceived the instruction. Having gathered and analyzed the data, ANCOVA and content analysis was run. The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control group, i.e. experimental group outperformed the control group. Moreover, the results of the content analysis of the students reflective journal and the observation indicated different views towards critical pedagogy instruction for listening.