Our experience invites more questions than conclusions, but a few in-
sights emerge. A course such as the one described above, that seeks to
facilitate a critical examination of language production and use, has at
its core our assumption that language instruction can never be neutral,
it is always ideologically loaded. The experience described above makes
it clear that language users do not share an equal level of awareness of
the ideological power of language, and insofar as media literacy instruc-
tion entails techniques of critical deconstruction of texts, we must be
aware of the differential levels of awareness our students bring with
them.

The degree of sophistication and maturity of each student determines
the extent to which he or she is able to analyze a text. The students, who
are participating in the construction of their identities, still ultimately
make the choice of what to accept and what to reject. Even the decision
of whether to be analytical or not is up for grabs, and the dominant cul-
ture in Japan (as in the United States) does not promote analytical be-
havior in the general public. Accepting dominant cultural values has its
pragmatic, albeit short-term, advantages. What Lankshear and Lawler
( 1987) refer to as "improper literacy"--that is, the kind of literacy that
"either fails to promote, or else actively impedes [understanding and ac-
tion that transforms] social relations and practices in which power is
structured unequally" (p.74)--is the kind of literacy that would give our
students a chance at the jobs they were applying for; questioning the
status quo is not the kind of literate practice that our students' potential
employers were seeking.

The process of linguistic/textual analysis may contribute to strengthen-
ing analytic skills in other contexts, so students who come to the class
with relatively little experience in questioning and analysis may find
themselves applying their newly acquired skills outside the classroom. At
the end of the semester, many of our students seemed wistful at their own
loss of innocence--wanting to return to uncritical consumption of media
products for enjoyment but no longer able to look at texts in the same way
as before the course. We observed that the students had gone from a state
of indifference to a sense of being armed to face commercial interests and
make their own choices. None indicated that they would cease to be con-
sumers, but they conveyed that they believed their newly acquired media
literacy skills would help them to be more critical consumers and more
discerning parents (in the future) when it came to their children's activi-
ties (such as television viewing and electronic game consumption).

In spite of the fact that this course was an English course, most of the
meta-level learning ("learning about") that the students did concerned

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