82-795 Ideologies of Critical Language Awareness
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Within the field of Critical Language Awareness (CLA), language is understood as a social practice and, as such, is inseparable from historical, political, moral, and other ideological variables. Awareness of the ideologies and contexts that shape languages--and the teaching and learning of languages--allows one to understand and respect learner experience, interact effectively with language learners, design relevant curricula and materials, and potentially disrupt inequities that confront language learners daily. This course will introduce students to scholarship and pedagogies commonly found in CLA as a foundation for their own teaching, tutoring, consulting, and interacting with language learners in a variety of contexts. Through an exploration of communication skills and strategies (productive and receptive language skills, pronunciation and accent modification, etc.), students will investigate multiple approaches to language learner support. Course presentations, readings, discussions, and assignments will require students to think critically about teaching and research practices, the values on which those activities are based, and ways to challenge and transform the biases inherent in them. Students will also reflect on and evaluate a variety of instructional, sociocultural, cognitive, and linguistic dimensions of language learning, focusing on how these dimensions are expressed and experienced differently across various spaces, identities, technologies, and learner abilities. The main purpose of the course experience is to equip students with the information and analytical skills to support the diverse needs of language learners they will encounter in their future work.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026
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