From Theory to Practice: Critical Language Awareness Activities for the EFL Classroom

Dominika Mihaľová, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave

Abstract:

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) frames language as a social practice, drawing attention to how everyday features of language (lexical choices, grammatical structures, and discourse patterns) serve not only communicative purposes but also carry deeper social functions, such as reflecting and reinforcing ideologies, values, and power relations, along with constructing identities, social roles, and perceived realities. To equip language users with tools to evaluate, critique, and reflect on these aspects of language use, deepening their understanding of how language functions beyond grammar and vocabulary, there is a growing need to incorporate CLA into language teaching. In response to this need, our paper aims to offer a practical introduction to the implementation of CLA in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom: it outlines the theoretical foundations of CLA together with its core principles, explores its interdisciplinary nature and wide scope of content, and presents three adaptable EFL activities, each rooted in a different linguistic subfield (sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and critical discourse analysis), designed to develop learners’ operational and constitutive language awareness. In this way, the paper illustrates how CLA can be approached in practical terms, enabling teachers to guide learners toward more interpretative and transformative engagement with language and to move beyond surface-level competence in language use.

Key words: Critical Language Awareness, English Language Teaching, English as a Foreign Language, Language and Power