Critical Applied Linguistics and Education

Abstract

Critical Applied Linguistics (CALx) is not, as yet, a term that is widely used. Nevertheless, it appears to be a useful umbrella under which a number of emerging critical approaches to language and education can be described. Part of the difficulty in defining CALx lies in the difficulties in determining both what it is to be critical and what is meant by Applied Linguistics. The term critical has a number of senses, from the popular meaning of stating negative opinions (as in ‘don’t be so critical’), through the sense of the general practice of commentary (as in literary criticism), to a more psychological version of ways of thinking (as in critical thinking). The sense of critical being used here, however, derives from a line of cultural and political work (‘Critical Theory’), which takes as its basic goal the need for critical analysis of the social, cultural, economic and political ways in which people are inequitably positioned.