Acceso usuarios
Peter I. De Costa, Koen Van Gorp
Critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) serves as a valuable heuristic for recognizing linguistic diversity and, ultimately, contributing to the transformation of social inequities. The current Special Issue examines how CMLA development can be fostered through evidence-based instructional practices in pre-service language teachers. Building on previous work of critical applied linguists, Prasad and Lory’s (Citation2020) revised framework places the power domain at its core, thereby, unifying the other domains, including cognitive, affective, performance, and social, as identified by James and Garrett’s (Citation1992). This reconceptualization of the five domains of CMLA forms the foundation for the empirical-based instructional practices to CMLA development in language teacher education, which are the focus of the current special issue. The six studies and two commentaries demonstrate how CMLA can move from pedagogical stance to evidence-based practices across various educational contexts worldwide. By creating opportunities for pre-service teachers to identify how language and power intersect in their respective lives and educational settings, the authors in the special issue contribute to an expanding CMLA pedagogical toolkit. This toolkit aims to counteract the prevalent deficit perspective on multilingualism, aligning instead with asset-based pedagogic approaches, the call to decolonize pedagogy and the broader call for social justice.
