Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 2
Language, Power and Pedagogies
HILARY JANKS
Overview
In one classroom concerned with language and power, you might see
students redesigning a sexist advertisement, and in another one, constructing
a linguistic profi le of the class or fi guring out how the word perhaps
changes the meaning of a statement. Students might be calculating
their own ecological footprints after watching Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
or discussing how to address the problem of bullying in their grade.
Underpinning the work in these different classrooms are different
approaches towards teaching students the relationship between language
and power; language, identity and difference; language and the differential
access to social goods. This sociocultural approach to language education
is referred to by different names: critical literacy (Freire, 1972a, 1972b),
critical linguistics (Fowler & Kress, 1979), critical language awareness
(Clark et al., 1987; Fairclough, 1992), and critical applied linguistics
(Pennycook, 2001), New Literacy Studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Barton
et al., 2000; Street, 1984), multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), or multimodal
literacies (Kress, 2003). These moments embody the history of the
fi eld, with critical literacy being the most generic of the terms to describe
it. Critical literacy resists defi nition because power manifests itself differently
in different contexts and at different historical moments; it is affected
by changing technologies and different conditions of possibility. What
remain constant, however, is its social justice agenda and its commitment
to social action, however small it be, that makes a difference.
Many teachers fear critical literacy because they think of it as too political.
In thinking about power and politics, it is important to draw a distinction
between Politics with a big P and politics with a small p. 1 Politics with
a capital P is the big stuff, worldly concerns. It is about government and
world trade agreements and the United Nations peace-keeping forces; it is
about ethnic or religious genocide and world tribunals; it is about apartheid
and global capitalism, money laundering and linguistic imperialism.
40