Upcoming Conferences
Check out the following conference sessions that feature the work of CARLA’s initiatives. To receive breaking news on conferences that feature CARLA’s work, sign up for the CARLA mailing list and follow the center on Facebook and X.
American Association For Applied Linguistics Conference 2025
March 22–25, 2025
Denver, CO
Presentations by CARLA’s Initiative Leaders
Understanding the Role of Critical Inquiry in Social Justice Instructional Materials
Sunday, March 23, 2025
3:00–3:30 p.m.
Critical approaches to language education develop learners’ language proficiency, engage them deeply with cultural content, and empower them to question how language and culture embody, maintain, and challenge structural inequalities. Critical inquiry is key to these approaches and gets at the how and why of issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and justice. To better understand of the role of critical inquiry in language education, this study presents a materials analysis (Littlejohn, 2011; Tomlinson, 1999, 2003) of 39 lesson plans from eight social justice curricular units in seven languages to answer the following question: How and to what degree is critical inquiry represented in social justice language teaching materials?
The materials analyzed for this study were created using planning templates that incorporate two critical approaches–multiliteracies pedagogy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015) and social justice pedagogy (Hackman, 2005)–each of which includes activity types targeting critical inquiry: conceptualizing and analyzing from multiliteracies pedagogy and tools for critical analysis from social justice pedagogy. These activity types encourage students to consider multiple perspectives on language and culture; situate their learning within broader sociocultural contexts; and decenter their analytical frame. Previous materials analyses show that conceptualizing and analyzing combined comprise less than 15% of multiliteracies instructional materials (Menke & Paesani, 2020; Rowland et al., 2014). To date, no studies have analyzed materials developed using social justice pedagogy. To address this gap and answer the study’s research question, this materials analysis involved:
- Analyzing all tasks in the lesson plan corpus to understand the number and distribution of conceptualizing, analyzing, and critical analysis activities.
- Analyzing classroom implementation recordings of a subset of lesson plans to determine the amount of time devoted to conceptualizing, analyzing, and critical analysis activities.
After presenting the findings of these analyses, implications for social justice materials design and teacher professional learning will be discussed.
Presenters: Mandy, Menke and Kate Paesani (University of Minnesota)
This presentation is directly related to CARLA’s Social Justice in Language Education initiative. Dr. Paesani will lead the CARLA Summer Institute Using Target Language Texts to Support Students' Literacies Development.
Understanding World Language Students' Critical Language Awareness in Social Justice-Oriented Classrooms
Monday, March 24, 2025
2:55–3:55 p.m.
In the past decade, critical approaches to language education have received increased attention in applied linguistics research. These approaches have the potential to increase students' critical language awareness (CLA), or their understanding of relationships between language and power. CLA is a crucial skill that enables learners to problematize dominant assumptions about language and culture and to use language to engage with diverse perspectives and experiences (e.g., Del Valle, 2014; Leeman, 2014; Quan, 2020). Research documents the CLA of learners of English as a second language and Spanish as a heritage language, yet few studies have explored CLA among English-dominant postsecondary learners in world language classrooms. To address this gap, this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study investigates the CLA of 100 intermediate postsecondary students of French and German learning about social and political aspects of language in the target cultures via a social justice unit.
Using CLA (Fairclough, 1992) as the theoretical framework, the study addresses the following research question: What is the nature of postsecondary language students’ CLA as they learn about social justice topics? Questionnaires, written reflections, and interviews were collected before, during, and after the social justice curricular units. Questionnaire responses were analyzed statistically, and multi-cycle descriptive coding was used to analyze written reflections and post-unit interviews conducted with a subset of 13 representative participants with low, mid, and high CLA. As a group, students’ CLA was statistically greater at the conclusion of the social justice unit, yet the amount and direction of change varied across individual participants. Together, quantitative and qualitative results point to the multifaceted nature of CLA and diverse understandings of the relationship between language and power. Findings are put into dialogue with previous reports of CLA development, and the potential for instruction to impact CLA is considered.
Presenters: Mandy Menke, Helena Ruf, Yoko Hama, Lauren Goodspeed, and Kate Paesani (University of Minnesota)
This presentation is directly related to CARLA’s Social Justice in Language Education initiative. Dr. Paesani will lead the CARLA Summer Institute Using Target Language Texts to Support Students' Literacies Development.