Critical and Social Justice Approaches to Teaching in the World of Language Classroom
Abstract
Language education has traditionally been viewed as teaching a second, foreign, or heritage language to speakers of the same first language. Rooted in colonialism, this approach is tied to a monolingual bias in Second Language Acquisition and Language Teaching, where the monolingual native speaker is positioned as the goal for language learners. This perspective has led to a one-size-fits-all model that often overlooks learners’ diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. In contrast, recent critical and social justice approaches prioritize students' linguistic and cultural experiences, identities, and the sociocultural contexts in which learning occurs. This presentation offers an overview of these critical approaches, examining whether our instructional practices reinforce ideologies, social hierarchies, and power dynamics. It also explores classroom strategies to resist such practices, encouraging student agency in language choices, identity construction, and language activism
