The implementation of the Critical Language Awareness (CLA) approach as a pedagogical strategy in second language (L2) writing classrooms essentially espouses teachers’ values and beliefs on appropriate academic registers. In this presentation, the role of CLA pedagogy in an academic writing course will be explained. I will demonstrate how instructor values are embedded in the delivery of the course and how students are empowered to develop their voices and rhetorical style through instructor and peer feedback. In addition, I will also explain the potential of CLA to promote students’ agency in making their linguistic choices in producing their academic essay. Apart from raising students’ awareness of the formal components of academic writing, the CLA approach can be applied to engage students in a dialogue that prompt them to critically review their academic writing expressions and to encourage them to develop their own voice and style. This dialogue can be supported with the use of technology and online collaborative tools. I will explain the application of the CLA approach through a two-pronged analysis of 1) the values embedded in the feedback given by the instructor to learners' drafts and 2) how students utilize instructor feedback in revising their writing to produce an academic paper. I will illustrate how instructor values were mediated through feedback and how student values emerged through their revision of their drafts based on instructor feedback. This presentation will conclude that teachers’ beliefs and values have an important role to play in the implementation of the CLA pedagogy. Teachers’ beliefs and values as articulated in feedback can influence students’ linguistic awareness in academic writing. CLA pedagogy can also promote student agency as it facilitates students’ critical understanding of the academic writing genre. Finally, this presentation will outline the implications on the design of CLA-oriented courses in the L2 academic writing context.

Azlin Zaiti Zainal is a Senior Lecturer at the English Language Department, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. Her research interests include teacher education, technology in language education, second language writing, oral communication, and discourse studies. Currently, she is working on a research project funded by Universiti Malaya on the discourses of English language teachers’ agency in online teaching, with a focus on teachers’ professional development. She is the Editor-in-Chief for the Malaysian Journal of ELT Research (MaJER).