Othering: Towards a Critical Cultural Awareness in the Language Classroom

Abstract

Due to the need of decentering language learners’ conceptions and practices of “othering” against the target culture, it has become necessary to help them grow in critical cultural understanding and positive appreciation towards the richness of difference and plurality, as a transversal dimension of their intercultural competence. Thus, this paper seeks to summarize the literature on the notion of othering and its pedagogical possibilities to promote critical cultural awareness raising in the language classroom. It initially presents some theoretical contributions on the concepts of the “Other” and the “Self” and its dialectical relation, and later, it proposes four pedagogical tools that could enable learners to achieve the already mentioned objective.

Keywords

• Critical cultural awareness
• language learning
• othering
• pedagogical tools
• the Other and the Self