Analytical Tools for Ideological Texts in Critical Reading Instruction

This article examines the ways in which language can be exploited in the manipulation of the reader's interpretation of a text to make him/her take certain lines of thought according to the writer's persuasive intents. Such functions of language provide valid foundations to support the teaching of critical reading skills and to explore an adequate approach to discourse analysis. A pilot study was conducted to find out the extent to which the reader can be coaxed into thinking in some fashions guided by specific linguistic devices employed for ideological texts. Forty-seven subjects divided into two groups (humanities majors and natural science majors at undergraduate level) joined the two-fold questionnaire surveys intended to look at their critical reading abilities. The empirical results indicate that college students whose majors are humanities were more inclined to take a holistic approach in processing commercial advertisement texts and their abilities for critical interpretation appeared to be lower than those of the subjects whose majors are natural sciences, who showed a relatively high tendency to take an analytical approach in decoding the textual facts. As a consequence, pedagogic implications for increasing critical reading abilities have resulted in a set of analytical procedures concerning ideological texts which is linked with instructional guidelines to emphasize the importance of the reader's logical and analytical reasoning power, entirely accepted as a general prerequisite for cracking the covert language gambits.