Abstract

In recent decades, there has been great emphasis and debate on what constitutes culture in the foreign language classroom: how we should teach culture (Kramsch, “Teaching Language along the cultural faultline”, “The Symbolic Dimensions of the intercultural”); how culture is represented in foreign language textbooks (Canale; Weninger and Kiss); and how culture is included in classroom practice (Moeller and Osborn; Skopinskaja). This paper aims to redirect the conversation and broaden its scope to focus not only on the target language’s culture but also the student’s sociocultural contexts. Further, this paper also argues for a critical perspective in addressing culture in the foreign language classroom. I address these issues by drawing from an approach to pedagogy that centers all aspects of learning on students’ cultural references (Ladson-Billings, “But That’s Just Good Teaching!”; Gay) and a complementary approach to language study that focuses “on the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance” (van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis” 283). Even though these approaches have been widely used and studied, they have not been particularly popular in foreign language teaching. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to argue for the relevance of these approaches to foreign language teaching and to present their benefits when applied to language learning pedagogies. In the following section, I present a brief overview of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), including pertinent literature on their application to the foreign language classrooms. Then, I present a brief example of how I implemented these approaches in the classroom. I conclude by offering general remarks on these two complementary approaches and their value to foreign language teaching. It is important to mention that even though I refer mostly to foreign language education, the methods and theories discussed here are applicable to language learners more broadly.