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Critical Applied Linguistics and Language Education

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Encyclopedia of Language and Education

Introduction

Critical applied linguistics (CALx) is an emergent approach to language use and education that seeks to connect the local conditions of language to broader social formations, drawing connections between classrooms, conversations, textbooks, tests, or translations and issues of gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, identity, politics, ideology or discourse. In the following sections I provide an overview of this work as the intersection of different critically oriented domains, such as critical discourse analysis, critical literacy and critical pedagogy, before discussing various problems and difficulties faced by this work, including struggles over the meaning of the term critical, the need for work beyond only critique, and the question of its applicability to the majority (non‐Western) world. Finally I discuss ways in which CALx opens up many new ways of thinking about applied linguistics, and thus presents to applied linguistics more broadly a fresh array...

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Pennycook, A. (2008). Critical Applied Linguistics and Language Education. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

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