Integrating social justice language education into ELT

Social Justice Language Education (SJLE) belongs to a tradition of critical pedagogy stretching back over several decades based on the work of Paolo Freire, which gives it a number of important concepts, including conscientização. Critical pedagogy and social justice are ideas that have attracted significant interest in Applied Linguistics over recent years without resulting in widespread adoption of these ideas in ELT. Brown’s article proposes a solution to this issue incorporating strong Communicative Language Teaching approaches. In this counterpoint article, we critique the proposal, pointing out some fundamental issues that we think SJLE needs to address. We conclude by drawing attention to an extant proposal that is less radical and seems more realistic.