ABSTRACT
Second or foreign language education is located in a pedagogical space where linguistic, racial, cultural, and class differences meet. Learning a new language, and the culture associated with it, exposes students to diversity and provides them with a new cultural perspective. Language teaching is thus often viewed as inherently compatible with multiculturalism. Nonetheless, a common approach to diversity in second language education often reflects the liberal form of multiculturalism, which promotes a superficial form of pluralism, reinforces coloror difference-blindness, and exoticizes and essentializes the culture of the Other, while obscuring issues of power and privilege (Kubota, 2004).
