Utilizing the Analysis of Social Practices to Raise Critical Language Awareness in EFL Writing Courses

Abstract

Language can be used as a means to control and influence people. EFL students need to realize that the language they interact with may contain ideological assumptions and propositional meanings. By increasing critical language awareness, students may come to recognize ideological assumptions within the language. Fairclough (2003) suggests that one of the ways to increase critical language awareness is to identify social practices, defined as rules and structures that limit human actions and interaction within a context. The elements of order of discourse– genre, discourse, and style—are the linguistic rules of social practices. The goal of this study was to provide a method for EFL teachers to increase students’ critical awareness through writing. The participants consisted of 16 teacher trainees and 10 university students who performed a journal-writing task over 10 sessions. Feedback, based on the elements of order of discourse, was provided after each session, and the participants were asked to consider the feedback for their next journal entry. After 10 sessions, the journals were quantified and regression analysis was used to calculate the slope polarity of the best fitting line. The results indicate that the scores of the majority of the participants increased.