critical literacy in my ESL

I teach at a local high school that is approximately 63 percent Latino, 23 percent African-American, 10 percent African, and 5 percent Asian. Majority of the students come from a variety of countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and China with various languages and cultural practices. With such a diverse student population, it is pertinent that each classroom, especially mine incorporates the multicultural or bilingual aspect of the student body. As a reading and English teacher, I work with a lot of students whose first language is not English, but who have a basic or proficient understanding of reading, listening, writing, and speaking English. Since many of my students read and write at or below a 4th grade level, I use a variety of texts that are relevant to the their lives and correlate to their lexile (reading) levels.
The diversity that exists within my class strongly indicates that I have to incorporate critical literacy into my day-to-day instruction in the classroom, especially when it comes to the texts we read. When selecting the books my students read, I look at the genre, the structure, and the kind of language used in the book. For example, in the first advisory, I picked the book Life of a Slave Girl, which is an autobiography about the life of Linda Brent Jacobs, a slave who later devised her way to freedom. The language used in the book was challenging, but was not overwhelming. The book also belonged to a genre in which many of my students have a wealth of information about. This produced a lucrative conversation among the students in my class when we discussed the book.