ABSTRACT

Intercultural language teaching and learning is one manifestation of the critical turn in language education. Its critical dimension is characterised by a strong emphasis on self-reflexivity in both teaching and learning, and by a transformational agenda for language education (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). It places learning, in this case learning of additional languages, at the centre of the critical enterprise, paralleling Habermas’s (1968) theorising of learning as fundamental in critical theory. For Habermas, learning is an emancipatory process that enables people to become self-determining social actors. Within language education, then, the critical project requires that the focus of language learning is to develop social actors capable of using language repertoires in ways that provide for agency both over language (in the choices they make about how to use their language resources) and through language (in the social possibilities they realise for themselves through their language repertoires).