Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
THE CRITICAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
The critical turn seemed to arrive in applied linguistics in the 1990s in a call by Pennycook (1990) in his seminal article "Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990s":
If we are concerned about the manifold and manifest inequities of the societies and the world we live in, then I believe we must start to take up moral and political projects to change those circumstances. This requires that we cease to operate with modes of intellectual inquiry that are asocial, apolitical or ahistorical. (pp. 25-26)
The field has since witnessed increasing studies drawing on a variety of analytical frameworks and approaches, many of which come under the umbrella term of critical discourse analysis (CDA). As CDA is interested in uncovering ways in which social structures of inequality are produced in and through language and discourse, it contributes to the critical turn in applied linguistics by offering theoretical and methodological resources for critical inquiry. In the following sections, I shall first outline the theoretical assumptions and major methodological approaches of CDA. Then, the applied linguistics areas in which researchers have conducted their studies with CDA approaches are reviewed. The strengths as well as the limitations of these approaches are discussed and the latest developments of CDA methodology are outlined with an emphasis on directions for future methodological explorations that can offer the greatest potential in overcoming some of the current methodological and theoretical limitations.
CDA: THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES
CDA has a history of only about three decades, with three key researchers who have made seminal contributions: Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, and Norman Fairclough. Each has used somewhat different analytical frameworks and focused on analysis of discourse in slightly different domains. CDA is thus best understood not as a unitary discipline but as a cluster of interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., van Dijk prefers the term critical discourse studies to emphasize its diversity) that are, however, united by some common theoretical assumptions and commitments. CDA's commitments are summarized in the following list (based on van Dijk, 2009; Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) and later used as criteria in reviewing recent CDA studies in applied linguistics.
1.
CDA is socially committed research: It is committed...