ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on critical literacy (CL) work in applied linguistics, particularly on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and additional language (AL) education, to highlight some recent paradigmatic changes in language theory and practice, offering new possibilities for CL education in AL teaching and learning. Heightened scales of diverse communicative practices and identities, resulted from mobile technologies, transnational migration, and transcontextual networks and flows have prompted new debates and understandings of language, as evident in the recent burgeoning research on translanguaging (TL), and other related translingual and plural approaches. These changing views of language and meaning-making practices present important implications for CL approaches to pedagogy and research in and for AL classrooms. We will first explain what AL, TL and CL mean, followed by a discussion on how recent TL fieldwork opens up opportunities for critical work while also raising concerns over its criticality and transformative potential. Examining a recent expansive view of TL that adopts ecological and posthumanist perspectives on language and learning, we discuss how this impending shift can potentially push CL beyond its traditional logo- and verbo-centric approaches to ones that mobilize students’ multiple linguistic, semiotic, bodily, affective and spatial repertoires to allow for multiple ways of knowing, feeling, experiencing, and meaning-making, opening up greater change-enhancing possibilities.
