Critical Applied Linguistics Must Renew for 2020s Challenges

The Language Trap We Built Ourselves

In 2020, as the world shut down, a strange thing happened to language. The word “unprecedented” became so ubiquitous it lost all meaning. Governments issued edicts using the passive voice to dodge responsibility. “Cases have been detected” meant nobody was in charge. “We are all in this together” meant some people were very much not.

Alastair Pennycook, a linguist who has spent decades studying how language shapes power, saw something else in the chaos. The pandemic was not just a health crisis. It was a linguistic stress test that exposed every fault line in how we use words to dominate, resist, and sometimes imagine something better. In a 2022 paper titled “Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s,” Pennycook argues that the field he helped pioneer must either renew itself or become irrelevant (Pennycook, 2022). The old tools for analyzing how language enforces inequality are not enough anymore. The 2020s are different. The questions are different. And the answers we inherited from the 1990s and 2000s might be part of the problem.

What Happened When Neoliberalism Met a Virus

Pennycook identifies two political trends that have reshaped the ground beneath applied linguistics. The first is long term: the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. This is not just an economic policy. It is a language ideology. Neoliberalism teaches us to see ourselves as entrepreneurs of the self, to speak in the vocabulary of “skills,” “competencies,” and “human capital.” Language learning becomes a personal investment, not a cultural or political act. The second trend is short term but seismic: the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath (Pennycook, 2022).

These two forces collided in devastating ways. When schools went remote, the language of education became saturated with corporate jargon. “Deliverables” replaced assignments. “Learning outcomes” replaced curiosity. Pennycook argues that critical applied linguistics must analyze how these linguistic shifts naturalize inequality. If you are a refugee learning English through a Zoom screen while your host country treats your native language as a deficit, you are not just learning a language. You are being sorted into a hierarchy.

The paper draws on decades of work showing that language is never neutral. But Pennycook pushes further. The question is not just who gets to speak and who gets silenced. It is how the very categories we use to talk about language, like “native speaker” or “standard English,” were invented to serve specific political projects. The pandemic made this visible. When a government says “essential workers” without naming who those workers are, it is a linguistic choice that hides the racial and economic dimensions of who gets exposed to the virus.

The Hope Trap and the Pessimism Trap

Pennycook devotes a significant section of the paper to a question that might seem abstract but is actually urgent: Should critical applied linguists be hopeful or pessimistic? This is not a philosophical indulgence. It determines what kind of research gets funded, what kind of activism gets pursued, and what kind of classroom practices get adopted.

The trap of pessimism is obvious. If everything is just another iteration of colonial power, then resistance is futile. But the trap of hope is more subtle. Pennycook warns against what he calls “uncritical hope,” the kind that celebrates multilingualism as inherently liberatory without asking who benefits from that celebration (Pennycook, 2022). A corporate diversity program that hires translators for a global workforce is not the same as a community fighting for language rights.

The authors found that critical applied linguistics has oscillated between these poles. In the 1990s, the field was energized by postcolonial theory and the possibility of resistance. In the 2010s, many scholars became disillusioned as neoliberal reforms gutted language programs. The pandemic deepened this crisis. Pennycook does not offer a neat resolution. Instead, he argues for a “critical hope” that is grounded in specific practices and skeptical of grand narratives. You do not need to believe the system will collapse to fight for a better classroom.

The Turn Against Turns

Applied linguistics, like many academic fields, has a fetish for “turns.” There was the social turn, the discursive turn, the multilingual turn, the translingual turn, the raciolinguistic turn, the decolonial turn. Each turn promised to revolutionize the field. Each turn generated conferences, journal issues, and career advancement for its proponents.

Pennycook is skeptical. He argues that these turns often function as what he calls “epistemological gentrification.” A new turn arrives, claims to displace everything that came before, and in the process erases the work of scholars who have been making similar arguments for decades, often from marginalized positions (Pennycook, 2022). The translingual turn, for example, celebrates linguistic fluidity and hybridity. But Indigenous scholars have been describing their languages as fluid and relational for centuries. The turn repackages this knowledge as a discovery.

The paper insists that we need to be both responsive to and skeptical of these shifts. Responsive because language is always changing and new forms of inequality emerge. Skeptical because each turn carries its own blind spots. The raciolinguistic turn, which examines how race and language co construct each other, is essential. But if it becomes just another academic brand, it loses its critical edge.

Pennycook proposes a method he calls “relationality.” Instead of choosing between turns, we should look at them in relation to each other. Material and discursive. Translingual and raciolinguistic. Queer and practice based. Multilingual and decolonial. The goal is not synthesis. It is disruption. When you hold two frameworks together, their contradictions become visible. And those contradictions are where the real work happens.

Ten Principles for a Broken Decade

The paper closes with ten principles for critical applied linguistics in the 2020s. They are not a manifesto. They are more like a checklist for people who want to do this work without falling into the traps Pennycook has identified.

• ▸Principle 1: Acknowledge the political. Language is never neutral. Every classroom, every test, every policy is a site of struggle.
• ▸Principle 2: Stay materialist. Discourse matters, but so do bodies, resources, and infrastructure. A translingual approach that ignores poverty is incomplete.
• ▸Principle 3: Be historically grounded. The present is not unprecedented. Colonialism, slavery, and capitalism have shaped language for centuries.
• ▸Principle 4: Resist epistemological gentrification. Do not let new turns erase older knowledge.
• ▸Principle 5: Embrace relationality. Hold contradictions together instead of resolving them.
• ▸Principle 6: Practice critical hope. Act without certainty of victory.
• ▸Principle 7: Stay local. Grand theory is seductive, but the most important work happens in specific contexts.
• ▸Principle 8: Question expertise. Who gets to be a linguist? Whose knowledge counts?
• ▸Principle 9: Engage with practice. Theory without application is performance.
• ▸Principle 10: Remember that language is not everything. Critical applied linguistics is important, but it is not the only fight.

What the Research Does Not Prove

Pennycook’s paper is a theoretical intervention, not an empirical study. It does not provide new data about language classrooms or test scores. It does not measure the effectiveness of any specific pedagogical approach. Some readers might find this frustrating. They want numbers. They want evidence. They want to know if critical applied linguistics actually helps students learn English faster or get better jobs.

The paper does not answer those questions. But that is partly the point. Pennycook is arguing that the questions themselves are ideological. The demand for measurable outcomes is itself a product of neoliberal logic. If you ask whether a critical approach improves test scores, you are already accepting that test scores are the right metric.

There is also a tension in the paper that Pennycook does not fully resolve. He criticizes academic turns for being self serving, but his own call for renewal is itself a kind of turn. The paper is published in a peer reviewed journal, addressed to other academics, and uses the vocabulary of theory. It is hard to see how this reaches the communities it claims to serve. Pennycook acknowledges this problem but does not offer a solution.

What This Actually Means

• ▸If you teach language, stop treating your classroom as politically neutral. Every textbook, every grammar rule, every pronunciation standard carries a history of who was included and who was excluded. Acknowledge that history with your students instead of pretending it does not exist.

• ▸If you design language policy, resist the temptation to celebrate multilingualism without asking who benefits. A school that allows students to use their home languages in class is not automatically decolonial. Ask whether those languages are being valued or just managed.

• ▸If you are a researcher, be suspicious of the next big turn. Before you adopt a new framework, ask who is promoting it and whose work it erases. The most innovative ideas often come from scholars who have been ignored by the mainstream.

• ▸If you are a student, pay attention to the language of your institution. When your university talks about “excellence” or “global competitiveness,” ask what those words mean and who they exclude. You are not just learning a subject. You are learning a way of talking about the world. Choose carefully.

• ▸If you are an activist, do not mistake linguistic change for political change. Rewriting a policy document in inclusive language is not the same as redistributing resources. Language matters. But it is not the only thing that matters.