Discourse, Critique and Subject in Vocational Language Education in Germany: An Outline of the Concept of Critical Foreign Language Didactics

Abstract

The paper offers an attempt at including the critical-discursive perspective in the reflection on vocational language education in Germany; its aim is to outline a base for critical foreign language didactics drawing on the critical and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis. The first part of the paper forms a reconstruction of the enmeshment of vocational language education in a number of contexts (political, migrational, and integrative). Constituting a transformative variant of language didactics and examining vocational language education, critical foreign language didactics will be perceived as a research program pertaining to the reflection on education and pedagogical activity (under the framework of critical pedagogy), teaching and learning (from the standpoint of the critical trend in general didactics), and language education and its specificity within teaching and learning particular languages (in the context of foreign language didactics). The final part of the paper will present methodological implications by indicating potential directions for – and levels of – vocational language education analysis. It will also offer an attempt at their further clarification aimed at a critical analysis of subject formation and forms of subjectification.