Similar relations exist in court cases in Australia, where the lack of under-standing of the pragmatic features of Indigenous Australians’ English compounds the injustices of a long history of racism, poverty, and prejudice. As a recent study by Eades (2000) suggests, “silencing of witnesses was particularly evident in situations where the legal professionals did not understand some aspect of Aboriginal lifestyle and culture which the witness appeared to deem relevant to answering a question” (p. 190). In such contexts we can see not only the interrelationship between many of the domains of critical applied linguistics described above – critical approaches to discourse, translation, bilingualism, language policy, pedagogy – but also the inter-relationships between these and underlying social relations of race, class, gender, and other constructions of difference.
32.3 Critical Frameworks
While the coverage, role, and orientation of applied linguistics remains conten-tious (see Candlin, 2001; Davies, 1999; McCarthy, 2001; Widdowson, 2000, 2001), so too does the notion of what it means to be “critical” or to do “critical” work. Apart from some general uses of the term – such as “Don’t be so critical” – one of the most common uses is in the sense of “critical thinking” or literary criticism. Critical thinking 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. This form of “skilled critical questioning” (Brookfield, 1987, p. 92), which has recently gained some currency in applied linguistics (see Atkinson, 1997), can be broken down into a set of thinking skills, a set of rules for thinking that can be taught to students. Similarly, while the sense of critical reading in literary criticism usually adds an aesthetic dimension of “textual appreciation,” many versions of literary criticism have attempted to create the same sort of “critical distance” by devel-oping “objective” methods of textual analysis. As McCormick (1994) explains,
Much work that is done in “critical thinking” . . . – a site in which one might expect students to learn ways of evaluating the “uses” of texts and the implications of taking up one reading position over another – simply assumes an objectivist view of knowledge and instructs students to evaluate texts’ “credibility,” “purpose,” and “bias,” as if these were transcendent qualities. (p. 60)
According to Widdowson (2001), applied linguistics, as a discipline that mediates between linguistics and language teaching, “is of its nature a critical enterprise.” In this sense, “to be critical means the appraisal of alternative versions of reality, the recognition of competing claims and perspectives, and the need to reconcile them” (p. 15). This means “taking a plurality of perspect-ives into account so as to mediate between them, seeking points of reciprocity, and correspondence as a basis for accommodation.” Although there will inevitably be “partiality and prejudice in the process,” these should be kept
“under rational control” (p. 16). For Widdowson, then, being critical is a process of evaluating different perspectives on a topic. This vision of critical applied linguistics sits squarely within this first orientation toward the critical, a position based largely on a liberal and humanist politics and epistemology. But, apparently without any sense of irony, Widdowson also warns that there is another sense of the critical, namely “ideologically committed to a single perspective” (p. 15). Before discussing the perspective that Widdowson is here warning us about, however, there is another sense of critical that also needs to be considered.
One of the central goals of applied linguistics has been to place questions of language in their social context. This appears to be a foundational view for many applied linguists, and is epitomized by the tendency to decry theoretical linguistics (and its arch-demon Noam Chomsky) and to extol the virtues of socially oriented models of language (as epitomized in the work of demigods such as Dell Hymes). It is in this orientation to the socially relevant, the contextualized, the real, that we can find another version of the critical. In his plenary address to the Eighth World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), Candlin (1990) asked “What happens when Applied Linguistics goes critical?” Candlin argued for a critical dimension to applied linguistics for two main reasons: First, because applied linguistics had started to lose touch with the problems and issues around language faced by ordinary language users. Applied linguistics, he argued, was becoming an arcane, sectarian, and theory-oriented discipline that was increasingly distanced from the everyday concerns of language use. Second, he suggested, a critical dimension was needed to reveal
hidden connections . . . between language structure and social structure, between meaning-making and the economy of the social situation, but also connections between different branches of the study of language and their relationship to our central objective, the amelioration of individual and group existences through a focus on problems of human communication. A study of the socially-constituted nature of language practice. (1990, pp. 461–2)
In this view, then, critical applied linguistics can be seen as an attempt to make applied linguistics matter, to remake the connections between discourse, language learning, language use, and the social and political contexts in which these occur.
Yet one of the shortcomings of work in applied linguistics generally has been a tendency to operate with “decontextualized contexts,” that is to say, with only a very limited view of what constitutes the social. 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 over-localized and under-theorized view of social relations. One of the key challenges for critical applied linguistics, therefore, is to find ways of mapping micro-and macro-relations (but also to go beyond this micro/macro formulation),
ways of understanding a relationship between concepts of society, ideology, global capitalism, colonialism, education, gender, racism, sexuality, and class, on the one hand, and classroom utterances, translations, conversations, genres, second language acquisition, or media texts, on the other. Whether it is critical applied linguistics as a critique of mainstream applied linguistics, or as a form of critical text analysis, or as an approach to understanding the politics of translation, or as an attempt to understand implications of the global spread of English, a central issue always concerns how the classroom, text, or conversa-tion is related to broader social cultural and political relaconversa-tions. But without an element of critique, such a view remains concerned only with “relevance”: its vision of what it means to be critical is limited to relating the language to broad social contexts.
It is not enough, therefore, merely to draw connections between micro-relations of language in context and macro-micro-relations of social inquiry. Rather, such connections need to be drawn within 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. While a great deal of work in sociolinguistics, for example, has tended to map language onto a rather static view of society (see Williams, 1992), critical sociolinguistics 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 explor-ing language in social contexts that goes beyond mere correlations between language and society, and instead raises more critical questions to do with access, power, disparity, desire, difference, and resistance. It also insists on a historical understanding of how social relations came to be the way they are. But the crucial question is: What sort of critical social theory? (See Table 32.1.) One version, based on various lines of thinking deriving from the great line of Marxist thought, we might call emancipatory modernism, based as it is on modernist frameworks of materialism and enlightenment. It reminds us that critical applied linguistics needs at some level to engage with the long legacy of Marxism, neo-Marxism, and its many counter-arguments. Critical work in this sense, which I am here categorizing as the third category of the critical, has to engage with questions of inequality, injustice, rights, wrongs. Looking more broadly at the implications of this line of thinking, we might say that critical here means taking social inequality and social transformation as cen-tral to one’s work. Taking up Poster’s (1989) comment that “critical theory springs from an assumption that we live amid a world of pain, that much can be done to alleviate that pain, and that theory has a crucial role to play in that process” (p. 3), critical applied linguistics might be viewed as an approach to language related questions that springs from an assumption that we live amid a world of pain, and that applied linguistics may have an important role in
Table 32.1 Four forms of the critical in applied linguistics Goals Politics Theoretical base Focus of analysis Weaknesses Social relevance Language in social context Liberal-pluralism Constructivism, contextualization Social contexts of language use; meanings in context Social relevance assumed as adequate; no focus on transformation Critical thinking Detached appraisal Liberal-ostrichism Humanist-cognitive egalitarianism; critical distance Emphasis on the individual, openness of textual meaning Weak social theory; no means for dealing with difference, inequality or conflict Emancipatory modernism Ideology critique Neo-Marxism Critical theory, macro-structures of domination Critical text analysis, linguistic imperialism, language rights; emancipation Deterministic focus on structural inequality obscures agency and difference Problematizing practice Engagement with difference Feminism, postcolonialism, queer theory, etc. Post-occidentalism, anarcho-particularism Discursive mapping, resistance and appropriation; engagement with difference Possible relativism, irrealism, and over-emphasis on discourse
either the production or the alleviation of that pain. But it is also a view that insists not merely on the alleviation of pain, but also the possibility of change. While the sense of critical thinking I discussed earlier – a set of thinking skills, an ability to engage in detached appraisal – attempts almost by definition to remain isolated from political questions, from issues of power, disparity, difference, or desire, the sense of critical that I want to make central to critical applied linguistics is one that takes these as the sine qua non of our work. Critical applied linguistics is not about developing a set of skills that will make the doing of applied linguistics more rigorous, more objective, but about making applied linguistics more politically accountable. But as Dean (1994) suggests, the version of critical in Critical Theory is a form of “critical modern-ism,” a version of critical theory that tends to critique “modernist narratives in terms of the one-sided, pathological, advance of technocratic or instrumental reason they celebrate” only to offer “an alternative, higher version of ration-ality” in their place (Dean, 1994, p. 3).
A great deal of the work currently being done in critical domains related to critical applied linguistics often falls into this category of emancipatory modernism, developing a critique of social and political formations but offer-ing only a version of an alternative truth in its place: language rights replaces linguistic imperialism; critical readings of texts replace naive readings; teaching critical issues in the classroom replaces the avoidance of politics, and so on. This approach to critical applied linguistics, while directly relating questions of language use to issues of power and inequality, tends to maintain a belief in rationality, realism, and scientific endeavor, including the old Marxist divide between science and ideology. Thus, on the one hand, we have fairly traditional Marxian analyses of power in which “The relationship between social classes starts in economic production, but extends to all parts of a society,” and such class relations have “a more fundamental status than others” (Fairclough, 1989, pp. 33–4). And, on the other hand, this political form of analysis insists on its rational scientificity. Phillipson (1992), for example, explains that he is aiming to develop a theory of linguistic imperialism, thereby “contributing to ‘rational, scientifically-based discourse’” on the global spread of English, in the hope that “an adequate, theoretically explicit foundation for analyzing the issues has been provided” (p. 75). Summarizing work done in CDA, Kress (1990) insists that “while their activity is politically committed, it is nonetheless properly scientific, perhaps all the more so for being aware of its own political, ideological, and ethical stance” (p. 85), a sentiment echoed by Wodak (1996) when she argues that CDA is “a socially committed scientific paradigm. CDA is not less ‘scientific’ than other linguistic approaches” (p. 20). Yet while claiming to be politically radical, this approach to critical applied linguistics is often intellectually conservative. My central point here is that just as critical work cannot be politically conservative but epistemologically rad-ical (as some types of postmodernist analysis may be described), neither can it be politically radical but epistemologically critical (as some domains of critical work appear). As politically oriented academic work, it needs an interrelated critique of both domains. In place of this version of critical modernism, with its emphasis on emancipation and rationality, Dean (1994) goes on to propose what he calls a “problematizing” practice. This, he suggests, is a critical prac-tice because “it is unwilling to accept the taken-for-granted components of our reality and the ‘official’ accounts of how they came to be the way they are” (p. 4). Thus, a crucial component of critical work is always turning a skeptical eye toward assumptions, ideas that have become “naturalized,” notions that are no longer questioned. Dean (1994) describes such practice as “the restive problematization of the given” (p. 4). Drawing on work in areas such as feminism, anti-racism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, or what has been called post-Occidentalism (see Mignolo, 2000), this approach to the critical seeks not so much the stable ground of an alternative truth, but rather the constant questioning of all categories.
From this point of view, critical applied linguistics is not only about relating micro-relations of applied linguistics to macro-relations of social and political
power; nor is it only concerned with relating such questions to a prior critical analysis of inequality. Too much emancipatory modernist work operates by melding a fairly standard (applied) linguistic framework with a given political framework. A problematizing practice, by contrast, suggests a need to develop both a critical political stance and a critical epistemological stance, so that both inform each other, leaving neither the political nor the applied linguistic as static. Power, as Foucault (1991) suggested, should not be assumed as a given entity but rather should be explored as the very concern that needs explana-tion. Critical applied linguistics is a mixture of social critique and anarcho-particularism, questioning what is meant and maintained by many of the everyday categories of applied linguistics – language, learning, communica-tion, difference, context, text, culture, meaning, translacommunica-tion, writing, literacy, assessment – as well as categories of social critique – ideology, race, gender, class, and so on.
Such a problematizing stance leads to another significant element that needs to be made part of any critical applied linguistics. If critical applied linguistics needs to retain a constant skepticism, a constant questioning of the givens of applied linguistics, this problematizing stance must also be turned on itself. As Spivak (1993) suggests, the notion of “critical” also needs to imply an awareness “of the limits of knowing” (p. 25). As I suggested above, one of the problems with emancipatory-modernism is its assurity about its own rightness, its belief that an adequate critique of social and political inequality can lead to an altern-ative reality. It is this position that Widdowson critiques as being “ideologically committed to a single perspective” (2001, p. 15). A postmodern-problematizing stance, however, needs to maintain a greater sense of humility and difference, and to raise questions about the limits of its own knowing. This self-reflexive position also suggests that critical applied linguistics is not concerned with producing itself as a new orthodoxy, with prescribing new models and pro-cedures for doing applied linguistics. Rather it is concerned with raising a host of new and difficult questions about knowledge, politics, and ethics.
32.4 Concluding Concerns
The arrival of critical applied linguistics on the applied linguistic scene has, not surprisingly, caused some concern. Davies (1999) argues that “the influence of CAL is pervasive and can be unhelpful” (p. 139). He goes on to suggest that
Modernist approaches (such as CDA) and postmodernist critiques (such as CAL) of applied linguistics are . . . seductive. They provide a useful debate on the nature of the discipline, they need to be taken into account. But they must not be allowed to take over, cuckoo-like. Because their interest at the end of the day is not primarily in . . . “real-world problems in which language is a central issue.” And since this is what applied linguistics is about, it is difficult to consider
