applied to language learning pedagogies. In the following section, I present a brief overview of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), including pertinent literature on their application in foreign language classrooms. Then, I present a brief example of how I implemented these approaches in the classroom. I conclude by offering general remarks on these two complementary approaches and their value to foreign language teaching. It is important to mention that even though I refer mostly to foreign language education, the methods and theories discussed here are applicable to language learners more broadly.
Literature Review
Critical Discourse Analysis and foreign language teachingTheoretical background Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), also referred to as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and sometimes used interchangeably with Critical Linguistics, has its roots in "Rhetoric, Text linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy, Socio-philosophy, Cognitive Science, Literary Studies and Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics" (Wodak and Meyer, "Critical DiscourseAnalysis" 1). CDA is a problem-oriented, inter-or multi-disciplinary approach to studying social problems through the systematic analysis of language and texts (Machin and Mayr). CDA primarily seeks to identify and analyze "discursively enacted or legitimated structures and strategies of dominance and resistance in social relationships of class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, language, religion, age, nationality or world-region" (van Dijk, "Aims of Critical Discourse Analysis" 18).Given the wealth of traditions that have influenced it, CDA draws from several disciplinary backgrounds, which, in turn, bring great diversity in terms of methods and foci of investigation. For CDA, language is a form of social practice (Fairclough and Wodak) and
