Critical Literacy in Analyzing the Texts“Mulan”

Proposed in 1970 by Freire, critical literacy has attracted many scholars emerging in this field, such as Lankshear,Mclaren, Luke, Halliday, Wallace etc. From balancing social inequalities to a pedagogical approach in second language teaching,critical literacy is no longer an unfamiliar concept in daily life. To clarify how critical literacy is applied in news media, this papers focuses on two parts. Firstly, it briefly introduces the theoretical framework of critical literacy aroused in the past 40 years,and how it is implemented in children's literature. With the use of Bean and Moni's framework, a discussion of The Ballad Mulan(from Chinese history 386-581) and Disney's animated feature film Mulan(1998) puts an emphasis on the character construction and power relations. Certain aspects will be carefully analyzed, such as the powerful teenagers and weak adults, the effect of sociocultural and ideological factors in the language used in different medias, the gender identities, etc.