Critical Language Awareness Perspective in ESL Classes

This text is a vista into how the lack of a critical dimension to ESL language teaching and learning deadens the pupils' critical edge to activate their potential in exercising their critical responsible citizenry. It snugly captures a language teaching context obsessed with immediate mercantile results that treats language as a mechanical interprise rather a social phenomenon. The insights revealed are interesting, and a rather bleak picture of teacher competence emerges. The author contents that such an approach prepares unthinking individuals that merely live for the crowd and sadly views existing set of knowledge as finite, and truth as absolute and God-given. Conversely, his stance are that language learning should reflect that any set of conclusion or knowledge is provisional subject to continuous critical revision and that language itself is imbedded with ideology, hence never neutral. The author took a resolved stance to consistantly illustrated throughout the text how the Critical Awareness Language Perspective enriches the ESL teaching and learning.

Autorentext

I head the Language Unit of the University of Johannesburg.Previously taught and supervised studies in English Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at UJ,UWC,RAU VISTA and UNISA. Researched,published and presented papers in the fields of Critical Language Awareness,Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Policy.