This paper discusses how to use literature, particularly multicultural picture books, to support critical literacy development in Asian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. As course instructors, we draw from reflexive inquiry on our experience as two faculty members at a Canadian university where much of our postsecondary teaching supports preservice and inservice teachers. Cole and Knowles (2000) define reflexive inquiry as “inquiry situated within the context of personal histories in order to make connections between personal lives and professional careers….”(p. 2). As teachers and researchers, we come from different interest areas and backgrounds: Bev is a native-English-speaking Canadian majoring in Elementary Literacy education, whereas Hyunjung, born and raised in Korea, is a Korean-English bilingual with English as an Additional/Second/Foreign Language (L2) education specialization. Yet, a common lesson we both teach in secondary and elementary preservice teacher education contexts involves critical literacy (Luke & Freebody, 1997) and reader-response (Rosenblatt, 1938). As teaching colleagues, we often discuss our courses, our successes, and our struggles as instructors. As the reflexive inquiry project begins, it is the beginning of a new term. We sift through our previous teaching evaluations from students and engage in teaching conversations between ourselves, preparing for upcoming courses. Along with suggestions for change in our future teaching, we see many positive comments from our preservice teachers in relation to a module involving multicultural picture books (a set of books that is partly based on an original study discussed in Bainbridge & Johnson, 2013)—texts with simple language but mature themes that inspire discussion across the grades from Kindergarten to Grade 12 and beyond. We formalize ideas gleaned from our stance as reflexive inquirers (Lyle, 2009) who examine our teaching narratives to identify past experiences (reflective) and forward movement (reflexive) to further improve our teaching.

Conscious of the potential for these illustrated books to support critical literacy development in Asian EFL classrooms as well as Canadian classrooms, particularly given their accessible language, we identify in this article a reading pedagogy promoting critical reader response. We also provide a list of books that would inspire interest as well as opportunities for rich English language learning in increasingly diverse classrooms in Asia. That is, the results of our reflexivity, the goal of our inquiry stance being future