Introduction: Critical Approaches

to TESOL
ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK
University of Technology, Sydney

This introductory article aims to pull together the unifying concerns in

the varied articles, reports, and discussions in this special issue. I focus
on three main themes that may be said to constitute critical approaches
to TESOL: (a) the domain or area of interest (To what extent do
particular domains define a critical approach?), transformative peda-
gogy (How does the particular approach to education hope to change
things?), and a self-reflexive stance on critical theory (To what extent
does the work constantly question common assumptions, including its
own?). Whether in terms of the domain in which they operate, the
pedagogies they use, or the theories they engage, I argue here for the
importance of seeing critical approaches to TESOL not as a static body
of knowledge and practices but rather as always being in flux, always
questioning, restively problematizing the given, being aware of the
limits of their own knowing, and bringing into being new schemas of
politicisation. The critical approaches to TESOL developed here can
both help us as TESOL professionals understand in much more
complex ways the contexts in which TESOL occurs and offer the
prospect of change. Given the cultural politics of English teaching in
the world, critical approaches to TESOL may help us deal with some of
the most significant issues of our time.

W hat is a critical approach to TESOL? Given the scope, breadth, and

quality of the contributions to this issue, it is tempting to leave
them to answer this question themselves. And in many ways, the broad
selection of papers here certainly presents a wide enough spectrum of
ideas, approaches, and pedagogies to claim a degree of representative-
ness. Indeed, one of my criteria for sending papers for review, or
reluctantly turning them down, was my attempt to include as wide a
range as possible. The rather vague title for the issue was intended to
address both critical ways of teaching English and critical appraisals of
contexts in which English is being taught, that is to say, both accounts of
teaching practice and research on teaching contexts (though another
goal of this issue was to break down some of these divides, as I discuss

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 3, Autumn 1999 329

later). I also aimed to make this issue as diverse as possible in terms of
topics, contexts, orientations, and backgrounds of authors. Thus, on one
level this issue should help give an overview of what might constitute
critical approaches to TESOL.
Unfortunately, such a view is overoptimistic for several reasons. First,
critical approaches to TESOL involve both pedagogy and research.
Despite my efforts to include a healthy mixture of the two, the often
difficult relationships between them, the very nature of a journal like
TESOL Quarterly, and the requirements for inclusion inevitably tilt things
away from accounts of what ordinary teachers are doing in ordinary
classrooms around the world. Some very interesting accounts of critical
education are included here, but they reveal only a tiny fraction of what
is going on day by day in ESL classrooms. Thus, although this issue
includes accounts, for example, of high school students in Hong Kong,
Canada, the United States, and Australia; popular adult education
programs in large urban centres in the United States; teacher education
programs; critical pedagogy in Brazil; and much more, it still only
scratches the surface of the work that goes on in the many TESOL
contexts around the world.
The second, related point concerns who gets published in the
international context. The power and politics of publishing in English
once again act as a major gatekeeper. Who actually reads a journal such
as this one? What institutions or individuals can afford it? Who has time
to read it? To whom does it speak in terms of ideas and practices that
resonate with local contexts? What is published is also a question of who
has the right sort of linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991; a
concept taken up by various writers in this issue) to have an article
published: Who knows the relevant codes of language and research—the
“secret language” of academic work? Which ways of framing knowledge
and research will be accepted? Into which discourses does one need to
gain entry in order to become a member of this community? In guest
editing this issue, I have tried to be inclusive, encourage different forms
of writing, and encourage play with academic norms, but only within very
tight constraints.
Finally, as an editor I am more than just a sieve that allows some things
to pass through while stopping others. My own editorial hand, as well as
the comments of the many reviewers of the contributions, has inevitably
influenced greatly what is included here as a critical approach to TESOL.
Nice though it would be simply to let these articles stand alone, I
therefore explain in this introduction what I see as a critical approach to
TESOL and how I think the contributions to this issue relate to that
vision. This explanation is not intended to be either a history of or a
state-of-the-art overview of critical work, as the contributions themselves

330 TESOL QUARTERLY

indeed serve that purpose; rather, I focus on three main unifying themes
that, in my opinion, constitute critical approaches to TESOL:
1. the domain or area of interest: To what extent do particular domains
define a critical approach?
2. a transformative pedagogy: How does the particular approach to
education hope to change things?
3. a self-reflexive stance on critical theory: To what extent does the
work constantly question common assumptions, including its own?
I also discuss various points of contention within the critical arguments
presented here.

CRITICAL DOMAINS

A first important aspect of critical work is the domain. At the most

general, domain has to do with attempts to connect the microrelations of
TESOL—classrooms, teaching approaches, interactions—with broader
social and political relations. It is not enough, however, simply to draw
connections between the micro and the macro. This is typically what
sociolinguistics purports to do, but as Williams (1992) suggests, socio-
linguistics can be critical only to the extent that it has a critical sociology
as part of its makeup; that is to say, it needs a form of sociology that aims
not merely to describe social formations such as class or gender but also
to critique the ways in which such social formations are linked to
questions of power and inequality. Thus, although critiquing work in
second language acquisition (SLA), for example, might be important
because it has tended to locate the process of learning solely in the
psychological domain without taking into account the social, economic,
cultural, political, or physical domains in which language learning takes
place, these contexts of learning must also be dealt with critically (see,
e.g., Gebhard’s discussion in this issue of the different effects of school
restructuring on learning possibilities for ESL students).
Typically, therefore, critical work in general has focused on issues of
class, race, or gender, in which relations of power and inequality are
often at their most obvious in terms of both social or structural inequity
(e.g., unequal pay, access to jobs and education) and the cultural or
ideological frameworks that support such inequity (e.g., discrimination;
prejudice; beliefs about what is normal, right, or proper). More recently,
however, critical work has sought to broaden the scope of such domains,
focusing increasingly on areas such as sexuality, ethnicity, and represen-
tations of Otherness while also attempting to explore how these domains
are frequently interconnected. This reorientation, therefore, seeks to

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 331

explore multiple ways in which power may operate in social life; it tries to
take on board the complex intersections among different forms of
identity; and it shifts the focus away from considering only material
conditions of inequality in order to show how culture or discourse may
play crucial roles in perpetuating the ways difference is understood,
reproduced, or changed.

TESOL, Power, and Inequality

The first constitutive element of critical work in TESOL, then, is an

attempt to locate aspects of teaching English to speakers of other
(othered?) languages within a broader, critical view of social and political
relations. It is not enough, therefore, just to try to connect TESOL to the
world in which it occurs; this connection must focus, as all the contribu-
tions to this issue do, on questions of power, inequality, discrimination,
resistance, and struggle. Ibrahim (this issue) addresses issues of race in
his demonstration of how students from non-English-speaking African
backgrounds studying in French schools in Canada “become Black” as
they enter into the racialized world of North America. This process of
becoming Black is intimately tied up with the forms of English and
popular culture with which these students start to identify. Goldstein’s
review of three books also addresses questions of race and ethnicity, and
shows why such questions are fundamentally important to language
education.
Class is the principal concern addressed by Lin in her argument in this
issue that particular ways of teaching English in Hong Kong (or
elsewhere) may lead either to the reproduction or to the transformation
of class-based inequality. Ibrahim similarly asks what the implications are
of his students identifying with marginality. Gender runs as a theme
through a number of contributions to this issue, from Rivera’s and Frye’s
accounts of participatory research and curricula in immigrant women’s
education in the United States to Mackie’s account of her development
of a feminist perspective in curriculum evaluation. Meanwhile, questions
of sexuality and sexual identity are the focus of Nelson’s analysis of a
discussion in an ESL classroom about the implications of two women
walking arm-in-arm down the street. Benesch’s account of a discussion in
an English for academic purposes (EAP) classroom also raises questions
about responses to sexual identity. This report also deals with the issue of
violence, which itself might be seen as a subtheme running through
some of the contributions: violence as a response to difference; violence,
gender, and rap music; violence and women in education; and numerous
contexts of symbolic violence (for discussion, see Lin’s article) through
constructions such as the native speaker.

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 Other contributors focus on different configurations of power and
inequality. Brutt-Griffler and Samimy point out the need to address the
inequalities in the relationship between the constructs of the native
speaker and the nonnative speaker, and Cox and de Assis-Peterson look at
the relationships between academic discourses on critical pedagogy and
the actual knowledge of critical pedagogy held by teachers of English in
Brazil. Ironically, critical pedagogy, which is often seen to have emerged
from Brazil through the work of Paulo Freire, now appears to have
reentered Brazil as an academic discourse disconnected from its original
popular roots. Johnston’s discussion of critical pedagogy raises similar
questions about the relationship between an academic rhetoric of critical
pedagogy and actual practices in classrooms.
Many of these domains are interwoven. Sexual orientation becomes
linked with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds: How do individu-
als from different cultural orientations understand, produce, or perform
different sexual orientations? The Latina ethnicities of the women in the
popular education programs discussed by Frye and Rivera are also tied
up with their class and gender identities as poor, unemployed, and
sometimes abused immigrant women. As Ibrahim makes clear, not only
race but also questions of class and gender are significant for his African
high school students. While enjoying privileged status as English teach-
ers who have traveled to North America to further their studies, the
diverse group of students described by Brutt-Griffler and Samimy also
find themselves disenfranchised as nonnative speakers of English. The
notion of native and nonnative speakers, furthermore, is interwoven with
issues of race and ethnicity, as one’s nativeness as a speaker of English is
often assumed to correlate with the paleness of one’s skin.

TESOL and the Global Power of English

With various degrees of explicitness, many of the issues discussed in

these articles, reports, and reviews are played out against the background
of the global power of English. This theme is a central one in the
discussion of teacher education for nonnative speakers of English. It is
also a significant background to understanding attitudes towards English
language teaching in Brazil (Cox & de Assis-Peterson’s article) and a
significant factor in the position of English in Hong Kong (Lin’s article).
Taken together, the contributions to this issue reveal an intricate
patterning of power relationships involving language, gender, sexuality,
race, class, ethnicity, popular culture, education, immigration, teaching
practices, curriculum development, and other concerns. The contexts in
which TESOL occurs are interwoven with these concerns, and the
accounts in this issue explore how a critical understanding of these

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 333

relationships is crucial to an understanding of the contexts of TESOL.
Thus, the contributors not only lend a great deal of complexity to the
notion of context in relationship to TESOL (see Gebhard’s and Price’s
reports for further discussion of context) but also view it politically.

Critical Work and Normativity

To some readers, critical work in TESOL may seem to boil down to a
mixture of TESOL and leftist politics. Such an objection has two strands:
On the one hand, one might argue that politics should stay out of
TESOL; on the other hand, the political stance taken here may be seen
as demonstrating an unacceptable normativity: One who espouses leftist
politics is being critical; one who doesn’t, isn’t. The first objection is fairly
easy to deal with: The vast majority of work in TESOL remains locked
within conservative or liberal frameworks, so a healthy dose of leftism is
justifiable as a counterbalance. But the second concern demands a more
complex response.
First, any attempt to depoliticise the notion of critical work needs to
be resisted. As Benesch argues, advocates of so-called critical thinking
espouse this idea of an apolitical version of critical work. But critical
thinking, as an apolitical orientation towards a general questioning
scepticism, is a far cry from the sort of critical work discussed in this issue.
Critical approaches to TESOL are fundamentally political, but the
critical approaches discussed here do not adhere in any simple sense to
a normative leftist politics. Indeed, we as TESOL professionals need to
move away from the modernist-emancipatory assuredness of traditional
leftist approaches to critical work and instead engage with a more
problematizing stance that always forces us to question the ethics and
politics of what we do. As I suggested above, the contributions to this
issue evidence a complex interweaving of multiple concerns related to
power.
On the one hand, then, critical approaches to TESOL must necessar-
ily take up certain positions and stances: The view of language or of
language learning cannot be an autonomous one that backs away from
connecting language to broader political concerns; the understanding of
education must see pedagogy as a question of cultural politics; and the
focus on politics must be accountable to broader political and ethical
visions that put inequality, oppression, and compassion to the fore. On
the other hand, it is important to avoid a narrow and normative vision of
how those politics work. Foucault (1980) states the issue well, suggesting
that “the problem is not so much one of defining a political ‘position’
(which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities) but to imagine
and to bring into being new schemas of politicisation” (p. 190). Perhaps

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this is a crucial challenge for critical approaches to TESOL: Rather than
mapping a static, given politics onto contexts of TESOL, this special-topic
issue is about imagining and bringing into being new schemas of
politicisation.

TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES
If a constitutive element of critical approaches to TESOL is a focus on
the inequitable contexts in which language education takes place, a
second element is a pedagogical focus on changing those conditions.
This theme goes to the heart of a key issue in critical work: the questions
of reproduction, transformation, structure, and agency. Critical analyses
of social structure and the ways in which social relations may be culturally
or ideologically maintained often tend to be pessimistic, deterministic,
and reproductive; that is to say, they tend to suggest that people are
trapped in unequal relations of power (e.g., men are more powerful
than women, the power of English goes on increasing, racism has always
been and will always be part of human life) and that most of what people
do simply reproduces those relations. A more useful approach to critical
work, particularly in education, however, needs some vision both of what
a preferable state of affairs might be and of how one might start to work
towards it. Thus, a second crucial element of a critical approach to
TESOL is the inclusion of a means of transformation.
But to envisage possibilities of change requires a way of thinking about
how people can act differently. The liberal humanist view of individuals
as completely independent, free, creative entities is rightly rejected from
a critical standpoint: Thought, movement, and speech are always con-
strained in multiple ways. Yet an all-encompassing view of people as
nothing but ideological dupes or discursive ventriloquists (i.e., every-
thing they say, do, or think is predetermined by ideologies or discourses)
is surely overdeterministic, leaving no possibilities for change or indi-
vidual agency. How to reconcile degrees of freedom with degrees of
constraint is one of the toughest conundrums in critical work. Price’s
report in this issue tackles some of these concerns, arguing that neither
critical approaches to discourse (critical discourse analysis [CDA]) nor
liberal critiques of CDA have come to terms with issues of structure and
agency in the context of how people take up positions in discourse.

The Problematic of Awareness

A critical approach to TESOL that aims to do more than describe

pessimistically what is wrong and instead suggests possibilities for change

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 335

therefore needs a way to suggest how change might happen. A common,
though by no means unproblematic, argument in critical work is that
awareness is an initial step in the process of change. Thus, Fairclough
and his colleagues (e.g., 1992) have developed the notion of critical
language awareness as an essential element of social change. Also signifi-
cant in this context is Freire’s (e.g., 1970) notion of conscientization, a
cornerstone of his work in critical literacy (see also Mackie’s account in
this issue of the development of her own feminist consciousness). A first
step in critical work may therefore be to develop an awareness of the
issues; nothing will change unless people know things need to (“if it ain’t
broken, don’t fix it”). But it is important to consider very carefully what
awareness might mean (see Price’s report in this issue). Work that aims
to make people more aware of their own oppression can often be
pessimistic and patronizing, especially if it is only a top-down attempt to
get people to see how they are oppressed. It is this stance of preacherly
modernist-emancipatory pedagogy, which some critical writers and edu-
cators seem to advocate, that many other teachers, students, and readers
have come to reject (see Gore, 1993).
The contributions to this issue, by contrast, seek to raise awareness in
different ways. Some of the accounts can help explain the complex
politics of, say, investment in forms of popular culture and language by
high school students as they become redefined and redefine themselves
as Black (Ibrahim’s article) or ways in which sexual identities emerge and
are submerged within ESL classrooms (Nelson’s article). On the other
hand, Frye and Rivera report on programs that seek in their educational
practice to raise awareness through collaborative research projects on
local contexts, and Ullman describes the development of an ESOL
curriculum aimed at helping students and their teachers gain a better
understanding of immigrants’ rights by preparing a textbook on the
topic. What start to emerge, then, are pedagogical approaches that seek
to work with students in developing their understanding of the wider
contexts in which they are learning English.
The pedagogical approach in Ullman’s work in this issue, as well as in
the programs described by both Frye and Rivera and the curriculum
evaluation described by Mackie, is based on participatory approaches to
education. As all four emphasize, a crucial element in any transformative
pedagogy is to put the curriculum in the hands of the students. Thus
some of the contributors report on a critical approach to the larger
context in which the students (in these cases immigrants, often women,
in large urban centres in the United States) find themselves whereas
others describe a critical approach to the microrelations of pedagogy, so
that issues of power, teaching, and knowledge are also addressed in the
educational process. There are close parallels here with the work
described in Morgan’s recent book (1998; reviewed by Norton in this

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issue) on his approach to TESOL in a community centre in Toronto. In
their approach to teacher education for overseas students, Brutt-Griffler
and Samimy principally attempt to encourage students to reflect on their
own histories through discussion and diary writing so that they are able
to see both how they have been positioned as nonnative speakers and
how they might start to make things happen differently.
Different approaches to transformative pedagogies occur elsewhere in
this issue. Benesch seeks to develop a dialogic relationship with her
students so that the EAP classroom becomes a site in which teachers and
students challenge and question norms and assumptions through discus-
sion. In a very different approach to critical literacy, Hammond and
Macken-Horarik, drawing on the work of Michael Halliday and others in
Australia, argue that doing critical literacy is impossible without prior
control over various generic forms. Lin’s discussion of pedagogies leads
in another direction: how different ways of teaching, different uses of
Cantonese and English, and different ways of asking questions may have
major repercussions on students’ response and resistance. Lin proposes
not an overtly critical approach to teaching in order to overcome
inequality but rather an awareness that many of the microprocesses in
classrooms may have reproductive or transformative potential.

Responses to Forms of Difference

Two concerns within a transformative pedagogy relate to pedagogical
responses to forms of difference. Put simply, the first hinges on whether
teachers see their pedagogical goal primarily as giving marginalised
students access to the mainstream through overt pedagogical strategies
or as trying to transform the mainstream by placing greater emphasis on
inclusivity. The second concern is the level of engagement with questions
of difference, whether this engagement takes the form of curricular or
pedagogical inclusivity, an overt focus on difference as a social issue, or a
pedagogical engagement with difference in terms of history and desire.

Access or Transformation?

The first concern, which has been widely debated in Australia, involves
the question of access as opposed to transformation, or, translated into
more pedagogical terms, genre as opposed to voice. Drawing on argu-
ments such as Delpit’s (1988) that children from African American
backgrounds are not helped by well-meaning White, liberal pedagogies
that back away from overtly teaching the so-called cultures of power and
on the similar arguments put forward by genre theorists in Australia
(e.g., Christie, 1996), Hammond and Macken-Horarik argue that their

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 337

concern is not so much with transforming the social order as with
ensuring that children from less privileged backgrounds gain access to
powerful linguistic and cultural tools (genres). They contend, therefore,
that students need to master generic structure before they can engage in
critical literacy and that skipping that overt instructional process in
favour of a general injunction to be critical does a disservice to students
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As the alignment with Delpit’s (1988) critique suggests, such access
models of critical literacy have been developed in reaction to the
so-called student-centred pedagogies that have originated predomi-
nantly in North America. Viewed from educational orientations in other
parts of the world, this pedagogical focus seems unacceptably centered
on the individual and lacking in any overt instructional processes. The
danger is that the political in education can become subsumed under a
rather bland notion of power sharing in the classroom. Given this North
American pedagogical orientation, notions such as participatory educa-
tion (see above) must not slide into an interest only in a redistribution of
power in the classroom. As I have argued with respect to the notion of
learner autonomy (Pennycook, 1997a), critical work that is reduced to
democracy in the classroom becomes elided too easily with so-called
student-centred approaches to teaching or even so-called communicative
or task-based approaches. Whatever values such pedagogical approaches
may have, they cannot be assumed to be in any way critical in themselves.
A critical approach to TESOL is more than arranging the chairs in a
circle and discussing social issues. Thus any participatory approach to
education must look not only at questions of power sharing in the
curriculum but also at the broader critical concerns outlined in the
section above on critical domains.
Critics have also suggested that this orientation towards democracy
and the individual underlies the centrality of the notion of voice in North
American critical pedagogy. As Luke (1996) describes it, the “Freirean
model theorises ‘empowerment’ as the opening of pedagogical spaces
for marginalised peoples to articulate their interests and develop an
analysis of the world; . . . power is vested phonocentrically in the
‘dangerous memories’ of individual and collective voice” (p. 315). For
some, this phonocentric idealism looks less like the radical program for
transformation that its proponents claim it is (see Johnston’s report for a
critique) and more like a liberal concern with being inclusive or a
romanticization of the notion of voice (see, e.g., Cope & Kalantzis,
1993).
An access model of critical literacy seen from the other side, however,
looks far too much like an assimilatory model to help students enter an
unchallenged mainstream. As Luke (1996) suggests, this model operates
with an unexamined “logocentric assumption that mastery of powerful

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text types can lead to intellectual and cognitive development, educa-
tional achievement and credentials, and enhanced social access and
mobility” (p. 315). Furthermore, as Lee (1997) points out, this approach
can amount to a pedagogy of deferral: The critical moment is always put off
in favour of mastery of certain forms. Thus, according to Luke, both the
logocentric “access” model and the phonocentric “voice” model of
critical education “tend to presuppose what we might call a ‘hypodermic
effect’ of literacy: that their preferred literate practices directly inculcate
‘power’” (p. 315).
Of course, neither position is often found in its extreme form. Most
adherents to any access model of education also emphasize the impor-
tance of critical readings of texts, and most adherents to a voice model
acknowledge that students need both the space for their voices to be
heard and the possibility of becoming proficient in dominant forms of
language and culture. But how do we as teachers balance these compet-
ing demands in our pedagogies? And, perhaps most important, how do
we go beyond a naive belief in the “hypodermic” effects of our pedagogies?
As Luke (1996) suggests, without an adequate “sociological theory of
power, conflict and difference” that can help “account for why and how
some discourses, knowledges and texts ‘count’ more than others” (p.
312), we have inadequate grounds to justify our pedagogies. This is one
reason why, as I argue further in the section on critical theory, our
pedagogies must also be linked to adequate theories.

A Pedagogy of Engagement

How do critical approaches to TESOL deal with the types of complex-

ity and diversity outlined by the contributions to this issue? If one of the
central concerns of a critical approach to TESOL is the need to engage
with questions of difference, this may be done in terms of inclusivity,
issues, or engagement (Nelson compares what she calls inclusion and
inquiry). Inclusivity may be seen as the struggle for diverse representa-
tions in classrooms and materials: Fewer wholesome White families who
look as if they have walked off the back of Kellogg’s Cornflakes packets
(after another regular dental checkup) and more single-parent families,
gay and lesbian parents, people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and
different physical possibilities. Although such alternative representations
may broaden the scope of classes and allow students to identify more
with texts and roles (see in this context Jewell’s 1998 discussion of
transgendered identity in the ESL classroom), if left at this level,
inclusivity does little to go beyond a rather static sense of possibility.
A second way to take up difference is to turn such questions into
“issues” by overtly addressing them in discussions. To the extent that

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doing so may confront social concerns more directly than does inclusivity,
it can generate a strong critical dimension to a classroom. Nevertheless,
there are also limitations here. First, as I have discussed elsewhere
(Pennycook, 1997b), many classrooms based around issues tend to
operate with a rather tired set of social issues. Similarly, Schenke (1996)
points to what she calls “the tired treatment of gender and ‘women’s lib’
in many of our ESL textbooks” (p. 156). Second, as Benesch’s report on
a discussion in her EAP class shows, it is not so much the discussion itself
but rather the teacher’s interventions that may count (see also the role of
the teacher in the discussion described by Nelson). And third, the whole
idea of discussing issues is based on something of a rationalist approach
to education. As Misson (1996) argues with respect to homophobia and
Rizvi (1993) in the context of racism, to develop antihomophobic or
antiracist education requires much more than a rational, intellectual
explanation of what is wrong with racism and homophobia. Rather, it
requires an engagement with people’s investment in particular dis-
courses, that is, in questions of desire: “Our subscription to certain
beliefs is not just a rational or a socially-determined thing, but we invest
in them because they conform to the shape of our desires” (Misson,
1996, p. 121). Thus, as Ibrahim makes clear, to engage pedagogically
with the Black high school students in his study, teachers need to be able
to work at the level of investment and desire.
This way of dealing with difference leads to what might be called a
pedagogy of engagement: an approach to TESOL that sees such issues as
gender, race, class, sexuality, and postcolonialism as so fundamental to
identity and language that they need to form the basis of curricular
organization and pedagogy. Thus, in place of discussions of issues,
Schenke (1996) proposes what she calls a “practice in historical engage-
ment,” a focus on “the struggle over histories (and forgetting) in relation
to the cultures of English and to the cultures students bring with them to
the classroom already-knowing” (p. 156). From this point of view, then,
questions of difference, identity, and culture are not merely issues to
discuss but pertain to how people have come to be as they are, how
discourses have structured people’s lives. Questions of gender or race,
therefore, make up the underlying rationale for the course. “Feminism,”
Schenke argues, “like antiracism, is thus not simply one more social issue
in ESL but a way of thinking, a way of teaching, and, most importantly, a
way of learning” (p. 158). From this point of view, taking a critical
approach to TESOL does not entail introducing a “critical element” into
a classroom but rather involves an attitude, a way of thinking and
teaching. And change in our students is not about the predictable results
of awareness or mastery but about the unpredictable effects of a changed
relationship to our histories and desires (see also Nelson’s and Price’s
accounts).

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 What emerge, then, from a consideration of critical practice in
TESOL are several important pedagogical points:
1. Critical approaches to TESOL need a transformative dimension as
well as a critically analytic one.
2. The notion of a critical approach to TESOL is in no way reducible to
teaching techniques, methods, or approaches as they are commonly
understood within TESOL.
3. To reiterate a point raised in the previous section, critical ap-
proaches to TESOL should not be conflated with notions such as
critical thinking (see Benesch’s discussion). Critical thinking is
generally an apolitical approach to developing a sort of questioning
attitude in students; critical approaches to TESOL have to do with a
political understanding of the location of pedagogy and the develop-
ment of a way of teaching aimed at transformation.
4. Neither should critical approaches to TESOL be assumed to be
critical pedagogy applied to TESOL. As Johnston points out, there
are many problems with critical pedagogy as commonly defined, and
these problems need to be subjected to as much critical scrutiny as
anything else.
5. If critical approaches are to engage with questions of power and
difference, they need both theoretical and pedagogical means of
doing so: What beliefs about the effects of voice or of powerful texts
may remain as unexamined subtexts to teachers’ own pedagogies?
6. Given the complexity of social, cultural, and pedagogical relations, a
critical approach to TESOL needs to work at multiple levels, includ-
ing an understanding of a critical domain, an approach to pedagogy
that aims at transformation, a way of shifting pedagogical relations to
give students more curricular control, and ways of engaging with
difference not merely in terms of inclusivity and issues but also at the
level of desire.

CRITICAL THEORY AS PROBLEMATIZING PRACTICE

I would also argue that critical approaches to TESOL need to be

grounded in some form of critical theory. Because of the difficulty of
some critical theory and because of a tendency at times to dismiss theory
as disconnected to practice, critical approaches not uncommonly reject
theory as irrelevant. As Weedon (1987) points out, there is a feminist
tradition of hostility towards theory—based, on the one hand, on the
argument that theorising, particularly dominant forms of Western ratio-
nality, has long been part of patriarchal power and control over women

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 341

and, on the other hand, on the argument that women need to draw on
their own experiences in order to guide political action (see also
Mackie’s report). A similar argument often emerges from contexts of
critical practice: that the real work is being done in classrooms, commu-
nity centres, and so on and that theory is only the empty babble of those
with too much time on their hands. Indeed, Cox and de Assis-Peterson’s
article suggests that critical pedagogy for TESOL in Brazil has become
little more than an academic discourse disconnected from everyday
teaching practice. Johnston’s critique of critical pedagogy points to
similar problems.
These problems, however, should not lead to a rejection of the role of
theory. Such a position would surely be problematic: Any pedagogical
choice implies some kind of theory, and talk about such notions as
empowerment, knowledge, power, inequality, race, class, gender, and
sexuality requires that they be theoretically grounded. Neither pedagogi-
cal practice nor personal experience can be assumed to be unmediated
by theoretical standpoints. Weedon’s (1987) argument is that whereas
both the patriarchy of theory and the primacy of experience need to be
taken very seriously, they should not constitute an argument against
theory, so that “rather than turning our backs on theory and taking
refuge in experience alone, we should think in terms of transforming
both the social relations of knowledge production and the type of
knowledge produced” (p. 7). In other words, feminism and, as I argue
here more generally, critical approaches to TESOL need forms of critical
theory that can help inform thinking about social structure, knowledge,
politics, the individual, or language.
Furthermore, a more useful way forward than to think in terms of
theory and practice and their relationship—an unfortunate dichotomy
that is constantly repeated in TESOL and indeed is maintained by the
division between TESOL Quarterly and TESOL Journal —is to consider the
notion of praxis, a term used explicitly in a number of articles here, such
as Rivera’s on critical praxis in the El Barrio Popular Education Program
and Brutt-Griffler and Samimy’s critical praxis for nonnative-English-
speaking teachers in a TESOL program. Praxis may be understood as the
mutually constitutive roles of theory grounded in practice and practice
grounded in theory. It is a way of thinking about critical work that does
not dichotomise theory and practice but rather sees them as always
dependent on each other. Thus, in different ways, the contributions to
this issue show not only how things might be changed through transfor-
mative practice and how TESOL professionals might think differently
through critical theory but also how theory and practice may be mutually
supportive. Morgan’s (1998) book is a good example of this sort of
melding of theory and practice into praxis (see Norton’s review in this
issue).

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“The Restive Problematization of the Given”
Dealing with theory requires a decision on which sort of critical
theory. The big-C, big-T Critical Theory that often forms the background
to critical work (derived from neo-Marxist thought and often associated
with the Frankfurt School, of whom Jürgen Habermas is the best known
current heir) is, as Dean (1994) suggests, a form of “critical modernism,”
a version of critical theory that tends to critique “modernist narratives in
terms of the one-sided, pathological, advance of technocratic or instru-
mental reason they celebrate” only to offer “an alternative, higher
version of rationality” in their place (p. 3). This view of critical theory
touches on the concerns I have raised about a form of modernist-
emancipatory politics that seeks to make people more aware of the truth
of their condition: There is a problem if critical theory only offers a
rationalist account of social conditions that is supposed to supplant a
possibly irrationalist account (an understanding obscured by ideology).
A critical approach that claims only to emancipate people through a
greater awareness of their conditions is both arrogant and doomed to
failure. As the discussion of engagement in the previous section suggests,
a more plausible way forward is through a critical engagement with
people’s wishes, desires, and histories, that is, a way of thinking that
pushes one constantly to question rather than to pontificate.
In place of critical theory, Dean (1994) goes on to propose what he
calls a problematizing practice. This, he suggests, is a critical practice
because “it is unwilling to accept the taken-for-granted components of
our reality and the ‘official’ accounts of how they came to be the way they
are” (p. 4). Thus, a crucial component of critical work is always turning
a skeptical eye towards assumptions, ideas that have become naturalized,
notions that are no longer questioned, or, in the words of Dean, “the
restive problematization of the given” (p. 4). I therefore make a case
here for critical theory as a problematizing practice that questions the
role of language or discourse in social life, that asks hard questions about
social and cultural categories (e.g., race, gender, ethnicity) and the way
they may relate to language learning, and that constantly problematizes
the givens of TESOL.
The articles and reports in this special-topic issue, then, contain
discussions of many of the key thinkers and ideas in critical theory. Of all
the accounts here, Kumaravadivelu’s is probably the most “theoretical.”
Arguing for a way of developing a notion of critical classroom discourse
analysis, this article can serve as a useful guide through issues in
poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Poststructuralism, particularly
the poststructuralist notion of discourse, as Kumaravadivelu contends,
can greatly further current thinking on notions of power and knowledge
and of dominance and resistance. Postcolonialism, often drawing on

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 343

poststructuralist insights, can then lead further into the historical and
political contexts of cultural relations in a global context, raising more
specifically the current and historical conditions that construct differ-
ence according to race or ethnicity (and see Pennycook, 1998). As
Brutt-Griffler and Samimy make clear, constructions such as native speaker
and nonnative speaker must be understood within the context of colonial
and postcolonial relations. Lin’s work on Hong Kong is also played out
against the background of (post)colonial relations. And Ibrahim empha-
sizes the importance of understanding the students in his study as
located within a postcolonial context.
Kumaravadivelu’s article covers a number of key thinkers in these
areas, including Homi K. Bhabha, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau,
Michel Foucault, Edward W. Said, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Many of these
thinkers turn up in other articles. Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital,
for example, is the central organizing background to Lin’s article.
Elsewhere, the work of Freire is highly influential—particularly in Cox
and de Assis-Peterson’s work and in the participatory and dialogic
approaches to education (in Rivera’s, Frye’s, and Benesch’s reports).
Other key contemporary thinkers are central to other articles here:
Judith Butler’s work on gender and sexuality, as well as the crucial recent
work in queer theory, forms the foundations for Nelson’s article. Ibrahim
draws on Bhabha, Bourdieu, Butler, Freire, Stuart Hall, bell hooks,
Frantz Fanon, and others. The feminist perspectives of Patti Lather and
Shoshana Felman are drawn on by Brutt-Griffler and Samimy, Mackie,
Price, and others. These theorists are cited in the articles and reports in
this issue not, as it sometimes may seem elsewhere, as a display of being
au fait with the current modes of thought (e.g., Pierre Cardin sunglasses
and a couple of references to Foucault) but as crucial tools for helping us
as TESOL professionals to ask hard questions about many of our
cherished beliefs: about sexual and cultural identities, about the possible
effects of our pedagogies, about what we take classroom discourse to be,
and about the roles of native and nonnative speakers.
Many of the articles and reports here not only draw on key bodies of
critical theory but also push further the current theoretical understand-
ing of important concerns. Price, for example, argues that there are
many complex questions to be asked about what it actually means to
acquire a discourse. According to Price, acquiring discourse cannot be
considered as simply a question of mastering certain characteristics of a
discourse (or genre), because, on the one hand, such characteristics
have been metadiscursively defined and are therefore external to the
process of acquisition and, on the other hand, because, rather than
serving the interests of preexistent subjects, discourse reformulates the
subject. In this view, then, the practices of discourse acquisition need to

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be understood. Like Price, Gebhard not only addresses a current area of
fierce debate (CDA and its critics for Price; SLA and its critics for
Gebhard) but also carries the debate forward in useful ways. Similarly,
other contributors develop new insights into the relationships among
language and identity, race, sexuality, SLA, classroom discourse analysis,
and so on.

A Critical Approach to Critical Work

Finally, I argue for a self-reflexive stance on critical theory. First, we as

TESOL professionals need to be constantly careful lest critical theory
come to play a role that is equally unchallenged as the ideas it seeks to
challenge. Thus, critical pedagogy in TESOL must not become a static
body of knowledge but rather must always be open to question. When
this special-topic issue was under discussion, a slightly skeptical member
of TESOL Quarterly’s Editorial Advisory Board asked whether there would
be space for critical work that was critical of itself. Such self-criticism is a
crucial element of critical work. An important purpose of this issue,
therefore, is not only to include articles and reports that are directly
critical of critical domains of work, such as Price’s critique of some of the
assumptions of CDA (as well as the assumptions of opponents of CDA),
Johnston’s account of his relationship to critical pedagogy, and Cox and
de Assis-Peterson’s questions about whether academic discourse about
critical pedagogy has much to do with classroom practices, but also to
push the authors here to question the ideas of critical theorists and to
push our thinking further.
Critical approaches to TESOL, then, would do well to retain a
constant skepticism, a constant questioning about the types of knowl-
edge, theory, practice, or praxis they operate with, and an understanding
that, as Spivak (1993) suggests, the notion of critical also needs to imply
an awareness “of the limits of knowing” (p. 25). As Canagarajah (1996)
has argued, critical research needs not only a focus on a critical domain
but also a critical approach to the way it gets written up. Nelson’s article
is significant here in that it not only draws on a crucial body of critical
work but also, through its own practices of reporting research, raises
questions about the nature of research and the possibility of understand-
ing what is going on. As with the other two areas of critical domains and
transformative practice, the relationship to theory must always be a
questioning one, never settling too long on some domain as if the field
had finally arrived at a “critical theory of everything.”

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL 345

CONCLUSION

I hope that the articles in this issue show that critical approaches to
TESOL matter fundamentally. They offer key insights into important
domains of research, possibilities for promoting change through educa-
tion, and an engagement with domains of theory that are rarely given
space in an area such as TESOL. In this introduction I have argued for a
vision of critical approaches to TESOL that sees them not as simple
recipes for implementing certain political agendas but rather as complex
clusters of social, cultural, political, and pedagogical concerns. Whether
in terms of the domain in which they operate, the pedagogies they use,
or the theories they engage, I like to see critical approaches to TESOL as
always in flux, always questioning, restively problematizing the given,
aware of the limits of their own knowing, and bringing into being new
schemas of politicisation.
Gee (1994) suggests that “English teachers stand at the very heart of
the most crucial educational, cultural, and political issues of our time”
(p. 190). This view is based on an understanding of the role of literacy
education in the United States. In the context of the current global
position of English, however, an even stronger case might be made for
the crucial role played by teachers of English to speakers of other(ed)
languages around the world. Given the global and local contexts and
discourses with which English is bound up, all of us involved in TESOL
might do well to consider our work not merely according to the
reductive meanings often attached to labels such as teaching and English
but rather as located at the very heart of some of the most crucial
educational, cultural, and political issues of our time.
If we can take up such challenges, critical approaches to TESOL may
become more than just an add-on to standard work in the area. For too
long, work in TESOL has been too narrowly constructed to be of much
interest to people outside the area. The breadth and depth of the work
in this special-topic issue, by contrast, suggests that enough exciting work
is going on to be of interest to a much broader audience. Indeed, the
sort of work presented here may become an area of great interest to
many sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, policy activists, or
antiracist educators outside the domain of TESOL who have started to
understand the crucial location of English teaching in the world. To take
up such a challenge, we need to develop critical approaches to TESOL,
because they can help us understand in much more complex ways the
contexts in which TESOL occurs and offer the prospect of change.
Critical approaches to TESOL may help us deal with some of the most
critical issues of our time.

346 TESOL QUARTERLY

THE AUTHOR
Alastair Pennycook is professor of language in education at the University of
Technology, Sydney. He formerly taught critical applied linguistics at the University
of Melbourne. He has also taught in Hong Kong, Canada, China, Japan, and
Germany. He is the author of The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (Addison Wesley Longman) and English and the Discourses of Colonialism
(Routledge).

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