Critical Language Awareness: Key Principles for a Course in Critical Reading

This paper will examine some key principles of Critical Language Awareness with reference to a class on Critical Reading which was taught to advanced foreign language learners. The paper will argue that CLA needs to be located within Critical Pedagogy, and that Critical Pedagogy is typically conceptualised around three major principles. They are, respectively, teaching as emancipatory, difference-orientated and oppositional. Some applications and implications of these principles will then be questioned on the grounds that they, first, position Critical Pedagogy as a marginalised project; second, that they overstate the importance of a confrontational stance to establishment discourse. The final part of the paper will examine the extent to which the rationale of the Critical Reading course addressed the need to develop a different understanding of critical pedagogy: one which values commonality rather than difference and resistance rather than opposition and which aims to bring Critical Pedagogy into the mainstream.