Critical Media Analysis in Teacher Education: Exploring Language-Learners’ Identity Through Mediated Images of a Non-Native Speaker of English

Abstract

Media literacy education has become increasingly present in curricular initiatives around the world as media saturate our cultural environments. For second-language teachers and teacher educators whose practice centers on language, communication, and culture, the need to address media as a pedagogical site of critique is imperative. In this article, I introduce critical media analysis (CMA) as a tool that cultivates discussion of language-learners’ identities as they are shaped by popular media. I present CMA in the context of critical language studies and communication theories that situate language in social and political landscapes. I describe a hybrid (quantitative/qualitative) approach to CMA as I apply it to a non-native speaker of English (NNSE) character from an internationally successful Hollywood film. I describe representations that “symbolically colonize” (Molina-Guzmán, 2010) the NNSE as lower class, lower status, and comfortably positioned as subordinate to his native-speaker counterparts. I then share examples of how students use CMA to further explore media cultivation of social attitudes toward language-learning, language policies, and NNSE identity. Overall, this article offers second-language teacher educators a theoretically informed model of analysis that engages TESL professionals as active participants in their media-saturated environments.