Teaching Language and Power
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TEACHING LANGUAGE AND POWER
INTRODUCTION
The teaching of language and power is now a recognised approach to language education in primary and secondary schools, and in some countries, such as Australia and South Africa, is included in state curricula. Critical literacy is an umbrella term for language pedagogies that grew out of the discipline of linguistics (including critical linguistics, critical language awareness (CLA), genre theory, critical discourse analysis) and out of work in the field of adult literacy. This use of the word ‘critical’ signals a view of language as central to the workings of ideology—as a key means of mobilising meaning to sustain or contest relations of domination in society (see also Pennycook, Critical Applied Linguistics and Language Education, Volume 1). Critical literacy education seeks to enable students to ask and answer the questions—whose interests are served by the way in which language is used? Who benefits? Who is disadvantaged?—so that out of this understanding, possibilities for change can emerge. It is underpinned by a strong equity and social justice agenda. The teaching of language and power depends on understanding that language is not a neutral tool for communication but is everywhere implicated in the ways in which we read and write the world, the ways in which knowledge is produced and legitimated, and the ways in which a human subject is constructed as a complex set of identities based on, amongst other things, race, class, gender, ability, age, nationality, sexual orientation. Research on diversity, difference and othering, often from a feminist, post-colonial or gay and lesbian perspective, has included careful work on language and its power to construct and delimit the ways in which we think the other and ourselves. Although this work has played a formative role in the development of critical literacy, it is not the focus of this review (see Pavlenko and Piller, Language Education and Gender, Volume 1). Here the focus is on critical approaches to language and literacy education. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
When Dell Hymes argued in 1974 that in addition to acquiring linguistic competence children also had to acquire communicative competence, S. May and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, 183–193. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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he brought about a fundamental change in language education. He established that language use is a fundamentally social activity and that communicative competence requires an ability to use language appropriately. Such competence includes knowing which language variety and register of a language is most suited to a social occasion; for multilingual children it requires knowing which language to use when, and the complicated social understanding necessary for codeswitching. His work made space for the social in language education. At the same time, William Labov was doing important work on langu
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