Critical Language Awareness: Opening Spaces for Educational Praxis in Turbulent Times of Transition and Crisis (original) (raw)
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Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical Language Awareness in Multilingual Contexts
Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2023
In the introduction to this special issue, which examines implementations of critical language awareness (CLA) in multilingual classrooms, the authors introduce CLA as a framework for equity in education that operates in tandem with critical and liberatory approaches such as translanguaging, funds of knowledge, youth participatory action research, linguistic landscapes, and linguistically sustaining teaching. This issue extends implementations of CLA from English writing classrooms, where it originated, to a range of PK-20 settings and unpacks practical challenges and decisions that students, teachers, and teacher educators make along the way.
Critical Language Awareness Development: A Pedagogical and Identity Engagement
2020
This paper aims investigating the engagement of critical language awareness in pedagogical context and how it can develop student's identity. As every day students contact newvaried language and culture products from social media, these may contain ideologies, values, and cultures that are foreign to students. Students need to understand the linguistic features beyond the discourse since behind every text there is ideological goal that may unconsciously influence student identity and it can be evaluate through critical language awareness. Critical language awareness itself is an approach in applied linguistics and language pedagogy which helps students understand language function and the way language works. Critical language awareness focuses on how language represents the world and social construction. It is in line with one of language function, to shape speaker's identity-in this case, the students. Students may display their identity through how they write and speak. Critical language awareness makes students understand their own language. Critical language awareness cannot be directly taught through the textbooks, but rather, the students build awareness by themselves. Nevertheless, the teacher can ease it through linguistic learning activities. Those linguistic learning activities can also sharpened student's identity.
Critical Literacies and Language Education: Global and Local Perspectives
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics - ANNU REV APPL LINGUIST, 2005
Increasingly aware of the "critical" turn in our disciplines, we offer a partial survey of scholarship in two key realms-English for academic purposes (EAP) and globalization-where the term "critical literacy" has particular relevance. We begin by addressing some key concepts and ideological tensions latent beneath the term "critical." We then address the pedagogical priorities that arise from this conceptualization, in particular, the use of texts to distance individual and group identities from powerful discourses. Next, we review studies that demonstrate how different teachers and researchers have engaged in unraveling and cross-questioning the rhetorical influences of various texts types, including multimodal ones. In the final section, we discuss the intertwined processes of homogenization and diversification arising from the economic, cultural, and political strains of globalization with particular emphasis on their implications for critical literacies and language education.
Heteroglossia: A space for developing critical language awareness?
This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, "Language and Literacy in Secondary School", a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences -a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students' writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.
Critical Language Awareness Intellectual and Social Context
In the latter half of the 20th century, applied linguists, dissatisfied with the positioning of language teaching, called for a multidimensional curriculum to reframe teaching (about) languages, be they first or heritage languages (L1s or HLs); English as a second, foreign or international language (ESL, EFL and EIL); or other foreign languages (FLs). Their dissatisfaction stemmed from languages being viewed in isolation (like linguistic silos), an overemphasis on teaching the four skills in a discrete (unintegrated) manner, and decontextualized grammar and vocabulary teaching. Out of this discontent grew the notion of " language awareness, " with language awareness pedagogy implemented in the UK school system for the first time in 1974. The notion and pedagogical interventions emerged from the desire to bridge languages taught in isolation, and recognize the role language plays in all subject matter teaching (i.e., language-across-the-curriculum) (Hawkins, 1999). Later, applied linguists argued that the grammatical and lexical choices authors make in written discourse or other semiotic " texts " are not neutral; their choices can persuade and influence readers of science or business texts just as much as they can shape how polemic arguments are interpreted. Researchers advocated for students to be taught how to read texts critically as part of the school curriculum, arguing that they need explicit instruction on how lexical and syntactic maneuvering can position texts as authoritative and thus influence whether EIL students interpret positions and claims as trustworthy and credible (e.g., Clark, Fairclough, Ivanič, & Martin-Jones, 1991). Students need to be aware that no text is neutral, and that authors can make their points without explicitly revealing their parti pris. Applied linguists called for explicit, yet age-appropriate, instruction on critical discourse analysis to equip students with the skills needed to " read " texts critically (including oral, visual, and other texts), and recognize veiled ideologies expressed through seemingly neutral, yet persuasive, lexical choices, phraseology, and symbols. Students able to discern persuasive (not neutral) manifestations of worldviews expressed through vocabulary choices, as well as syntactic and other AQ1 eelt0660.indd 1 3/14/2017 5:52:32 PM
Introspection as a Method of Raising Critical Language Awareness
The Journal of Humanistic Education and Development, 1999
This article examines the use of introspection in applied linguistic research to raise critical language awareness. The author provides an example of her diary study to illustrate the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie language learning. Implications, including those for teaching methodology, for humanistically oriented language educators are discussed. Over 50 years ago, John Dewey (1954) wrote about democracy in political as well as educational contexts as "an art of full and moving communication" (p. 184). By this, he meant communication that encourages critical thought and free social inquiry and that discourages mystification-a "kind of knowing that surpasses and transforms, that makes a difference in reality" (p. 18). Struggles for new forms of expression and more authentic speaking continue to be vital ones for underrepresented groups. Educators in the emancipatory and humanistic tradition study what might happen if education encouraged people to imagine alternative ways of being in the world with others (Freire, 1990; Greene, 1995); to respect and affirm diversity (Neito, 1996); to resist and challenge marginalization (Giroux, 1992); and to expand the many borders-gender, racial, class, linguistic, cultural-that keep us from connecting despite our differences (Giroux, 1992; Kanpol & McLaren, 1995). Moments of tension-when we become insecure about our appearances and mannerisms, when we cannot speak, when we perceive our differences to be deficiencies-are vital sources of learning that can dissolve unless we actively and critically reflect on them. This article examines the use of introspection in language education to raise critical language awareness. The constitution of the Association for Language Awareness defines language awareness as "explicit knowledge about language and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching, and language use" (Scott, 1994, p. 91). Critical language awareness is the recognition of the "ways in which language can construct and sustain identity; how language can shape social practice" (Clark,
Criticality and English Language Education: An Autoethnographic Journey
HOW, 2021
This article, relying on a series of epiphanies throughout my journey as a researcher and scholar-activist, shares my relationship with criticality and how it has guided my research and teaching agendas. I share how critical theories have informed my main research areas and the questions and issues I have raised in my own work. The article also discusses my main scholarly influences and how my interactions with varied literature, mentors, and colleagues have shaped my own criticality. I also take a moment to reflect on how this journey has helped the field of language education in Colombia to continue with the evolution toward stronger critical and social justice-oriented frameworks and how I see my changing positionality as mentor and ally of colleagues and the future cadres of scholars moving forward.
Critical language awareness in foreign language learning
Literatura y lingüística, 2005
Este trabajo ofrece una descripción panorámica de las formas en que la Conciencia Crítica de la Lengua puede contribuir en la enseñanza y aprendizaje del Inglés como lengua global, lo cual incluye un conjunto de medios digitales y modalidades de comunicación visuales y verbales. La panorámica ofrecida comienza con el concepto de Conciencia de la Lengua, se detiene en mayor profundidad en el de Conciencia Crítica de la Lengua y establece un paralelo con el impacto de Paulo Freire y su concepción basada en las nociones de justicia social, identidad, poder e inequidad. Finalmente, se presenta el desarrollo histórico en contexto de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en Chile y se detalla el sentido más amplio en que el discurso está siendo definido, aquel de "discurso multimedia".
This working paper examines students' linguistic perceptions and communicative competence in the context of a super-diverse ESL classroom. Through the use of discourse, filmic, and ethnographic analyses, I show the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt sources of multilingual students' linguistic self-perceptions. I argue for the need to explore students' ideas and experiences of language through a pedagogy that focuses on knowledge about language and, in particular, knowledge about the ideological dimensions of language: what is known as critical language awareness, or CLA. I make the claim that it is in multilingual students' everyday interactions in which others, often native speakers of English, react in ways that are internalized by students as evaluations of their own linguistic skills. These evaluations I refer to as metacommentary (Rymes, 2014). Thus, I argue that a pedagogy of critical language awareness is necessary not only to make explicit the ways in which such interactions function, but also to provide emergent multilinguals with powerful learning opportunities where their experiences of transnationalism/immigration and plurilingualism can truly be used as a resource for learning. Not only can this lead to productive pedagogical interventions, but harnessing students' critical metalinguistic awareness can also be a powerful tool to scaffold language learning and beyond.