This chapter focuses on critical language awareness (CLA), a growing area of specialization in sociolinguistics with direct implications for language education. In this chapter, I briefly outline the theoretical underpinnings of CLA and focus more concretely on the educational applications of the field. I begin with a commentary about the political and media discourse around Barack Obama's language as a means to illustrate the perspective of CLA, or what it means to be 'critical'. I will further illustrate the critical approach with an in-depth examination of a dialogue with a well-meaning teacher in an effort to highlight the centrality of ideology in CLA. I will then focus my attention on some classroom applications of CLA as well as the implications for sociolinguists and educators. Finally, we will revisit the conversation with the well-meaning teacher in order to take a critical, reflexive look at sociolinguistics by making connections between race, gender, sexuality and language use. The chapter concludes by envisioning a new approach to language education and social transformation.

'I Love Barack Obama – He's Just So Articulate!': What It Means to be 'Critical'

Critical language study, according to Fairclough (1992: 7), 'highlights how language conventions and language practices are invested with power relations and ideological processes which people are often unaware of'. Throughout the chapter, this central point will be highlighted, as it is a core component of CLA. This section illustrates what it means to adopt a 'critical' view, or as Freire (1985) once put it, the perspective of someone 'who questions, who doubts, who investigates, and who wants to illuminate the very life we live', by examining some widely taken-for-granted linguistic conventions and beliefs in the discourse about the US President Barack Obama.

The historic 2008 US presidential election generated and continues to generate an incredible amount of discourse on race and race relations in the United States. The majority of this discourse has focused on Barack Obama, the nation's first African–American president, and his incredibly 'gifted' speaking abilities.