The purpose of this paper was to provide a theoretical outline of why critical media literacy (CML) should be included in Korean English education teaching practices and teacher training curricula. CML is a pedagogy designed to sensitize students to ideological meanings embedded in media that socialize people into specific values, beliefs, and behaviors. This paper begins with a review of theoretical foundations of CML including the symbolic nature of human consciousness signification and the processes of socialization, which are theoretically encapsulated within the dialectic among post-structural theories of discourse and representation. A review of literature on CML and its application to English as a foreign language (EFL) is then presented. Applications of CML include situated inquiry, discussion, creation of group multimodal projects suggests, how it fosters the development of critical thinking skills, the acquisition and use of new vocabulary idioms, and transforming student perceptions of themselves and their society.

Many Korean scholars have praised progressive initiatives in the current Korean National Curriculum (KNC) and Korean National English Curriculum (KNEC), although they also state that the actual teaching practices have changed little. With each new iteration of the KNC it is apparent that the Korean Ministry of Education (MOE) is encouraging a pedagogical agenda that reflects the necessities of situated learning and ‘student-centered’ approaches to teaching and learning. The MOE’s inclusion of ‘micro-teaching’ in tertiary teacher training program reviews also illustrates its increasingly active measures to affect educational change in Korea. Concomitant with the recent MOE initiatives, there has been a growing interest in practices of critical literacy/pedagogy in English education over the past 15 years in Korea. The purpose of critical literacy is to educate students to be knowledgeable, creative, and active participants in a democracy for the purposes of increasing social justice and agency. Thus, it becomes possible, and desirable, to undertake a theoretical analysis of the language and intent between the KNC/ KNEC and theories of critical literacy. This paper analyzes the language ant intent of the KNC and KNEC to determine the extent to which they reflect the theories and pedagogies of critical literacy. Results of this analysis indicate that that critical literacy supports the goals of the curricula and suggest that it should be included in tertiary teacher education programs.