Critical Applied Linguistics

Critical applied linguistics is a field of inquiry and practice that can be understood in several ways. It brings a critical focus—where the critical is understood as social critique rather than critical thinking—to applied linguistic work. A central goal is to connect questions of 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) to applied linguistic concerns. A key challenge for critical applied linguistics is therefore to find ways of understanding relations between, on the one hand, concepts and critiques of society, ideology, neoliberalism, colonialism, gender, racism, or sexuality and, on the other hand classroom utterances, translations, conversations, genres, second-language acquisition, media texts, and other common applied linguistic concerns. Whether it is critical text analysis, or an attempt to understand implications of the global spread of English, a central issue is always how a classroom, text, or conversation is related to broader social cultural and political relations. Critical applied linguistics suggests therefore certain domains of inquiry—language and migration, workplace discrimination, anti-racist education, language revival, for example—but also insists that all domains of applied linguistics—classroom analysis, language testing, sign language interpreting, language and the law—need to take into account the inequitable operations of the social world, and to have the theoretical and practical tools to do so effectively. Critical applied linguistics can also be seen as the intersection between different critical domains of work—such as critical pedagogy, critical literacies, and critical discourse analysis—where these pertain to applied linguistic concerns (critical second-language pedagogies for example). There are also several domains that carry labels other than “critical”—such as anti-racist education, feminist discourse analysis, queer theory—that are equally part of the picture. As a domain of applied work, critical applied linguistics seeks not just to describe but also to change inequality through forms of research, pedagogy, and activism.