Critical dimensions of plurilingualism came to the fore during the multilingual ‘turn’ in language education (LE), marked by the prominence given to issues of justice, equality, and rights regarding language and learners. Despite the proliferation of studies on plurilingualism, there remains a relative scarcity of research explicitly framed around critical plurilingualism that emphasizes issues of equity, diversity, and social justice in LE by addressing linguistic and cultural inequalities experienced by plurilingual individuals. I address this gap by interviewing 20 researchers of multi/plurilingualism to answer the questions: Is plurilingualism different from critical plurilingualism? How would you define critical plurilingualism? Framed by a critical interpretive research paradigm, this study applied Fraser’s (2005) critical social justice theory with its concepts of recognition, redistribution, and representation (3 R) to the analysis of 20 interviews with researchers. Participants see plurilingualism’s origins controversially: as inherently critical or lacking criticality. They present criticality on the continuum demonstrating plurilingualism’s potential for social justice: from recognitive justice – due to its inherent criticality, to distributive, and representative justice – when purposefully enacted. Implications include conceptualization of critical plurilingualism from the 3 R perspective.
Marina Antony-Newman (Mon,) studied this question.