Since the educational reforms being established are normally reflected on an effort to reform the National curricula, the recent educational reform in Greek Language Curriculum, has included the overall philosophy and principles of ―critical literacy‖. Critical literacy focuses on developing critically literate individuals to meet the challenges of the 21st century. In other words, it aims at developing readers and writers as active participants in the reading and writing process. As a result, the communicative-genre based approach is ineffective to fully meet that demand.
This paper examines the “transition” from the communicative approach and functional literacy to critical literacy in the curricula for primary education and its impact on language teaching in Primary Education. The starting point of this study is the so-called “reform Arseni” namely the three successive versions of the curricula of 1999, 2001 to 2003(the Cross-thematic Curriculum framework), which are compared with the reformed pilot curriculum of the New School (2011). Through a comparative analysis of basic aspects of these curricula, the study aims at investigating how the principles of functional and critical literacy are presented in the Cross- thematic Curriculum framework (2003) and the Curriculum of the New School (2011), in an attempt to identify the innovative characteristics of the latter curriculum. Furthermore, an attempt was made to map the aspects of convergence and divergence, and to pinpoint the rate of exploiting the theoretical principles in the language teaching practice. The comparative study indicated the innovative aspects of the Curriculum of New School, which focuses on developing relationships between language and social practices, and enhancing reflection, communication, and critical awareness, as well as promoting the use of multi-media and multi-modality literacy in the classroom.
Keywords: functional literacy, critical literacy, Language Curricula, communicative / genre based approach, primary education