Critical Applied Linguistics

A Critical Re-Introduction

Alastair Pennycook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402360
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, this accessible guide and introduction to critical applied linguistics provides a clear overview of the problems, debates, and competing views in language education, literacy, discourse analysis, language in the workplace, translation, and other language-related domains. Covering both critical theory and domains of practice, the book is organized around five themes: the politics of knowledge, the politics of language, the politics of difference, the politics of texts, and the politics of pedagogy.

Recognizing that a changing world requires new ways of thinking, and that many approaches have watered down over time, the new edition applies a sharp, fresh look at established and new intellectual frameworks. The second edition is comprehensively updated with additional research throughout and features new discussions of colonialism, queer theory, race and gender, translanguaging, and posthumanism. With a critical focus on the role of applied linguists, Pennycook emphasizes the importance of a situated, collaborative perspective that takes the discussion away from questions of implementation, and insists instead that critical applied linguistics has to be an emergent program from the contexts in which it works.

This landmark text is essential reading for students and researchers of applied linguistics, multilingualism, language and education, TESOL, and language and identity.

1Introducing Critical Applied Linguistics

Critical applied linguistics is a critical approach to the theory and practice of applied linguistics. For such a statement to have much meaning, however, we need at the very least an understanding of the scope and meaning of the term critical and the ways it has been taken up in applied linguistics. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall focus on two main aspects of critical applied linguistics: An overview of what critical work in general entails, and a discussion of domains of critical applied linguistics. In the following discussion, I will distinguish between critical thinking and critical theory, and provide some initial background (developed in Chapter 2) to crucial components of critical work, including critical social theory, radical hope, and activism. In the second part of the chapter, I will discuss briefly how different domains of critical applied linguistic work operate, including critical sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA), critical literacy, critical approaches to translation, critical second language pedagogies, and critical language testing (CLT). These will be discussed in more depth in subsequent chapters focusing on the politics of language, difference, text, and pedagogy. This first chapter therefore will make it possible to develop a better understanding of this “critical approach” to applied linguistics, linking it to questions of power, inequality, and social change.

We might also arguably need a clear understanding of the scope and meaning of applied linguistics, though I do not intend to get into an extended discussion of this topic. A lot of time has been spent – much of it fairly fruitless – trying to define applied linguistics. We have fortunately moved on from the days when it was indelibly tied to language education, and particularly to teaching English as a second or foreign language. We have also moved on from the interminable discussions about whether we are mediating between linguistics (as defined elsewhere) and language education (linguistics applied) or whether applied linguistics has some more autonomous status (Markee, 1990; Widdowson, 1980). I prefer to think of applied linguistics less in disciplinary or inter- or transdisciplinary terms and more as temporary assemblages of thought and action that come together at particular moments when language-related concerns need to be addressed (Pennycook, 2018b). What this means will become more evident as we look at various domains of critical applied linguistics throughout the book.

What Does It Mean To Do Critical Work?

Apart from some general uses of the term – such as “Don’t be so critical,” which suggest that to be critical is to be unhelpfully negative about things – two related and common uses of the term can be found in literary criticism and critical thinking. The first suggests an ability to evaluate and comment on literary texts (or other texts and aesthetic objects in the case of television, film, or food critics), to convey to others the reasons for certain aesthetic judgments. While there is great variety these days in the ways such critical work operates (blogs and social media have opened up such work to a much wider range of forms than in an earlier era of newspapers and television), the genre largely mixes aesthetic and evaluative discussion in order to explain and justify why the author likes this book, film, CD, poem, wine, meal, and so forth. Critical thinking, by contrast, puts greater emphasis on forms of rational thinking. Seen in the Western tradition as dating back to Socrates, this tradition seeks to evaluate factual evidence, emphasizing objectivity and unbiased thought. It is used to describe a way of bringing more rigorous analysis to problem-solving or textual understanding, a way of developing more critical distance as it is sometimes called. Its focus is on forms of reasoning (induction, deduction, and abduction, for example) and the ability to evaluate an argument. This form of “skilled critical questioning” (Brookfield, 1987, p. 92) can be broken down into a set of thinking skills, a set of rules for thinking that can be taught to students.

In an age when learning ‘skills’ has become a key goal for many educational institutions, and when self-directed learning guides have become big business (see, for example, Paul & Elder, 2001), the teaching and learning of these critical thinking skills have been linked to better decision-making, smarter thinking, and various improvements to one's life, and have come to dominate both popular and academic understanding of what it means to be critical. Critical thinking refers to “an educational goal, a skill that can be acquired, developed, and sharpened and is reached individually” (Gounari, 2020, p. 11). It is based around notions of logic and reasoning, and is tied to goal-directed learning, and a specific program of guided thinking. It is this sense of critical that has been given some space by various applied linguists (e.g., Atkinson, 1997; Widdowson, 2001) who argue that critical applied linguistics should operate with this form of critical distance and objective evaluation. Although there is much to be said for such an ability to analyze and critique – I am by no means against it – it is a different approach to critical work that is the focus of this book. The sense of the critical that is central to critical applied linguistics draws on an alternative lineage of work that makes social critique central. It is concerned with questions of injustice, inequality, and discrimination.

A Critical Understanding of Language and Society

From this perspective, critical applied linguistics is concerned with the interrelationships among (adapting Janks, 2000) domination (contingent and contextual effects of power), disparity (inequitable access to material and cultural goods), discrimination (ideological and discursive frames of exclusion), difference (constructions and realities of social and cultural distinction), and desire (operations of ideology, agency, identity, and transformation). Whether this a priori focus on power and inequality means that such forms of analysis are always biased, lacking the objectivity central to any forms of analysis (and therefore in opposition to critical distance), will be an important focus of further discussion. Two basic positions refute such a criticism: On the one hand, many working in a modernist tradition maintain that critical inquiry can remain objective and is no less so because of its engagement with social critique. On the other hand, those working from a more postmodernist position reject the claims to critical distance, insisting that the claim to objectivity – indeed the subjective-objective distinction itself – is an unhelpful construction that leads us nowhere. These three approaches – critical thinking, modernism, and postmodernism – are sketched out in Table 1.1. We should be cautious not to set them too strongly against each other – they are much more complexly interwoven than this suggests – or to suggest these are fixed and closed traditions of thought – there is far more cross-fertilization than this kind of schema suggests – but it is important to understand there may be very different approaches to power, knowledge, and change at stake.

Table 1.1 Three Approaches to Critical Work

	Critical Thinking	Modernist critical theory	Postmodern critical theory
Politics	Liberal individualism	Neo-Marxism	Feminist, anti-racist, queer, and southern theory
Theoretical base	Humanist rationalism	Critical Theory	Poststructuralism
Goals	Objective thinking skills	Redistribution and ideology critique	Recognition and transformation

Whatever position one takes on critical work, it is clear that rather than basing critical applied linguistics on a notion of teachable critical thinking skills, or critical distance from social and political relations, critical applied linguistics has to have ways of relating aspects of applied linguistics to broader social, cultural, and political domains. One of the shortcomings of work in applied linguistics generally has been a tendency to operate with what I elsewhere (Pennycook, 1994a) called decontextualized contexts. It is common to view applied linguistics as concerned with language in context, but the conceptualization of context is frequently one that is limited to an undertheorized view of social relations. One of the key challenges for critical applied linguistics, therefore, is to find ways of understanding relations between, on the one hand, concepts of society, ideology, global capitalism, colonialism, education, gender, racism, or sexuality and, on the other hand, classroom utterances, translations, conversations, genres, second language acquisition, media texts, and so on. Whether it is critical text analysis, or an attempt to understand implications of the global spread of English, a central issue always concerns how the classroom, text, or conversation is related to broader social cultural and political relations.

It is not enough, however, merely to draw connections between microrelations of language in context and macrorelations of social inquiry. Rather, such connections need to do at least two things: First, they need to draw attention to the ways in which these small- and large-scale operations are always part of each other: A racist utterance is not best understood as an individual insult by one person to another but as part of wider social concerns: It simultaneously draws on broad racial ideologies and reinforces them. This is why Hacking (2004) insists on the need to find a space between discourse in the abstract, as described by Foucault, and face-to-face interaction, as discussed by Goffman: Foucault, as Hacking explains, “gave us ways in which to understand what is said, can be said, what is possible, what is meaningful” yet he did not give us ways of thinking about “how, in everyday life, one comes to incorporate these possibilities and impossibilities as part of oneself. We have to go to Goffman to begin to think about that.” (Hacking 2004, p. 300). McNamara (2019) makes a similar point when he connects conversation analysis (CA) with Butler's (1997) idea of performativity: In order to understand the wider workings of the world, we have to look locally at the microactions of language use. Similarly, however, we should not get too caught up in the minutiae of language lest we lose sight of the bigger picture. We need a way of looking at language that not only looks at society or institutions, that not only includes an understanding of the interactions of the everyday, but that also seeks an understanding of how such interactions are institutionally framed and such institutions are interactionally realized.

Second, the focus has to be from a critical approach to social relations. That is to say, critical applied linguistics is concerned not merely with relating language contexts to social contexts but rather does so from a point of view that views social relations as problematic. A great deal of work in sociolinguistics has tended to map language onto a rather static and consensual view of society (Williams, 1992), though this has been changing considerably over the last decade as the ‘new sociolinguistics’ has brought more critical questions to the table. Critical sociolinguistics (discussed in more depth in Chapters 2 and 3) is concerned with a critique of ways in which language perpetuates inequitable social relations. From the point of view of studies of language and gender, the issue is not merely to describe how language is used differently along gendered lines but to use such an analysis as part of social critique and transformation. A central element of critical applied linguistics, therefore, is a way of exploring language in social contexts that goes beyond mere correlation between language and society, and instead raises more critical questions to do with domination, disparity, discrimination, difference, and desire (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 Five Ds of Critical Work

Domination	Contingent and contextual effects of power
Disparity	Inequitable access to material and cultural goods
Discrimination	Ideological and discursive frames of exclusion
Difference	Social and cultural distinctions
Desire	Operations of ideology, agency, identity, and transformation

Critical Theory and Beyond

This focus on the inequitable operations of society has a long history. One strand that many have turned to is Critical Theory, a tradition of work linked to the Frankfurt School and such thinkers as Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and more recently, Jürgen Habermas. A great deal of critical social theory, at least in the Western tradition, has drawn in various ways on this reworking of Marxist theory to include more complex understandings of the ways in which the Marxist concept of ideology relates to psychoanalytic understandings of the subconscious, how aspects of popular culture are related to forms of political control, and how particular forms of positivism and rationalism have come to dominate other possible ways of thinking. At the very least, this body of work reminds us that critical applied linguistics has to engage with the lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: Decolonizing Critical Applied Linguistics
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Introducing Critical Applied Linguistics
• 2 The Politics of Knowledge
• 3 The Politics of Language
• 4 The Politics of Difference
• 5 The Politics of Text
• 6 The Politics of Language Pedagogy
• 7 Doing Critical Applied Linguistics
• References
• Index