CRITICAL THEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND EVALUATION OF CONTENT-BASED APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING

Though language teaching methods have been widely transformed in the recent decades under the influence of post-method revolution as well as critical theory in education, some of the practices of communicative era are still the focus of curriculum development in many parts of the world. Task-based (TBLT) and content-based language teaching (CBLT) are among these approaches both of which root in communicative language teaching philosophy. Adopting a critical approach to the study of language teaching practice, the present paper tries to evaluate how content-based approach can meet the criteria of a critical pedagogy to meet the socio-ideological expectations as well as communicative needs of language learners in the educational environment at the present time. The outcome of our analysis based on the critical pedagogy framework shows that CBLT can potentially be adapted and adopted to meet the standards of critical educational paradigm if some of its practices are given more conscious heed. The implication of the present study is that we will be more moderate in totally rejecting all the previous techniques and practices in language teaching, and instead, will adopt a more pragmatic view for enhancing the quality of our pedagogy.