Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Abstract Critical applied linguistics studies ways in which education, regulation, and the study and use of language relate to the realization, maintenance, and reproduction of the distribution of power in society. The critical move in applied linguistics focuses on issues of power as it is enacted, reproduced, and resisted through fields associated with language studies, such as language policy and planning, language codification, language teaching, language learning, and language testing. The purpose of this work is not only to understand and explain how power is constructed and exercised through language, but also to change the practices and empower those who are at risk from oppressive practices. Work that attempts to achieve these goals in applied linguistics has a “critical” perspective, even if it is not always labeled as such (Pennycook, 2010). Some of this critically oriented work predates the adoption of the term “critical” in applied linguistics, while others followed in response to a call by Pennycook in his 1990 article “Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990s”:

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