The Importance Of A Critical Stance

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A critical stance is a philosophical attitude towards social phenomena that critiques and questions the origins of dominance as an aspect of the struggle for a better world. The Critical Theory associated in particular with Habermas (1984, 1987) examines the symbolic orders of the 'life-world', and the pervasive ways in which systemic mechanisms such as money and power operate upon and shape it, in the interests of dominant classes. Criticality in communicative action is crucial to counter this: as summarized by Thomas McCarthy: 'This relentless attack on the communicative infrastructure of society can be contained... only by a countervailing expansion of the areas of life coordinated by Tiffany Jewelry communication, and in particular by the subordination of economic and administrative subsystems to decisions arrived at in open and critical j public debate' (2006: 200).

Turning to education, the pedagogy of Freire (1970) advocates a critical attitude which also plays out in communication. Freire goes further: in his praxis, action and critical consciousness ...
... combine as the goal of educational processes. Action without reflection is seen by Freire as uncritical activism; reflection without action is simply verbalism. For Freire, the action is embraced in a pedagogy whereby students are not cast as passive recipients of official knowledge; rather, they are asked to be critical actors who make meaning by posing problems of their lives in the world around them. Waters suggests that the promotion of a critical stance in our field is dominant to the extent that it itself has reached the status of ideology: 'an oppressive but largely unquestioned orthodoxy, a form of intellectual hegemony in its own right' (2009: 141). Is it really the case, though, that criticality in applied linguistics is an unquestioned or 'common sense' discourse, the dominant ideology? I would argue the opposite: that Jewelry Store applied linguistics as a field is not critical enough; and that a critical approach towards language pedagogy is crucial. Applied linguists can promote the notion among teachers and students that it is both possible and legitimate to question prevailing ideologies by developing a critical consciousness. For example, teachers and students frequently find themselves at odds with a public discourse which associates migrants with the supposed negative effects of immigration.

Finding ways of using language to counter such a constant challenge, and one which applied linguistics is in a position to address. A critical language pedagogy might, for instance, enable communicative work in classrooms which empowers individuals to speak out and be heard in institutional settings where they are normally inaudible. Or it might involve students critiquing the privileging of a standard variety of a language: not in order to prohibit its use but to gain an understanding of its power and hegemony. (Students tend to be well aware of the importance of access to the standard variety of a language, and that they will be judged according to how their own language uses measures up to a standard.)