Page 177 - Beyond Methods

Fostering language awareness 165
lum but also with the development of the individual learner’s in- tellectual capabilities that are required for long-term, multifaceted struggles in various sociopolitical arenas (Fairclough, 1992).
One way of integrating CLA with the development of learners’ intellectual capabilities is to help them understand how power is produced, maintained, and also resisted with the help of different language forms. This is not an easy task because, as Allan Luke (1996) reminds us, what lends controlling power to language is the way it is used and interpreted in specific sociopolitical contexts. There- fore, he and his colleagues suggest that the teaching of CLA should begin by putting any textual material used in the class “up for grabs, for critical debate, for weighing, judging, critiquing.” Such a criti- cal analysis of texts “also requires classroom frames for talking about how and in whose interests social institutions and texts can refract and bend social and natural reality, manipulate and position readers and writers” (Luke, O’Brian, and Comber, 1994, p. 141).
If we wish to encourage L2 learners to do the kind of critical analysis of language use suggested by CLA advocates, then we should take into account the ideological markers of a text in addi- tion to its propositional message. Only then will we be able to help our learners understand how language is used by some as a tool for social, economic, and political control. If we refrain from taking such a critical approach, we will knowingly or unknowingly con- tribute not only to the marginalization of our learners but to our own marginalization as well. What James Gee (1994, p. 190) says about teachers of English is also true of all language teachers: “Eng- lish teachers can cooperate in their own marginalization by seeing themselves as “language teachers” with no connection to such so- cial and political issues. Or they . . . accept their role as persons who socialize students into a world view that, given its power here and abroad, must be looked at critically, comparatively, and with a con- stant sense of the possibilities for change.”
Reflective task 7.6
Do you agree with Gee that, if your language teaching is not connected to social and political issues, you are cooperating in your own marginalization? In what way is this true or not true?