Critical Language Awareness

One of the aspects that called my attention most from the reading was the exercise on doublespeak on page 167. Kume cites Lutz to say that doublespeak is ‘language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable.’ The reason why this sparked my interest is because one of the fields that I’m interested in is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is a branch of studies in discourse analysis that looks at the way language is used as a tool of power for social, political and economic control. In my experience learning about CDA and doing my undergrad thesis using this approach, I always thought this was a great way to teach students about how the language works and how there are certain strategic choices language users make to promote or hide social representations. My first impression was that it was better-suited for first language learning since it seemed to be a very complex approach for second language teaching.

However, I found and tried ways to address this issue in the L2 classroom by using two simple grammatical concepts that are normally addressed from a LA perspective: these are the difference between the use of the passive and active voice and the processes that influence the word-choice decision-making progress. Just a couple of examples of how I’ve used this in the classroom (with not much success though):

Active voice: Protestors halt port causing shipping companies to lose millions.

Passive voice: Protestors tent encampment has been evacuated. Two protestors are injured.

Basically, what we can do here with students is to discuss why they think the active or passive voice is used. Here we see, how the subject-agent distinction is problematized by the use of the passive voice. In the first example, it is very clear that it was the protestors who stopped operations and the port. Then we can see how a consequence is included right after to make it clear to the audience that the protestors have brought a problem to something that is considered very important for a society: its economy. In the second example, the subject-agent distinction of the sentence is unclear. We know what the grammatical subject of the sentence is, but we do not know who the agent of the action is. Additionally, we also have access to the consequence of the evacuation, but the agent of the action is ambiguous again and leaves room for speculation.

After discussing this, one then moves to introduce the grammatical aspect of it, explaining what morphosyntactic processes are embedded in the forming of the sentence, and how these choices affect the way the message is received by the audience. In my experience, this approach helps students understand the distinction more easily by increasing the saliency of the difference between the two forms.