Critical ELT Materials is a platform that shares critical language education tools prepared and edited by pre-service teachers of English studying at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey under the supervision of Dr. Yasemin Tezgiden-Cakcak with the global community of critical language educators.  The language education tools (lesson plans and units) we share on this website aim to raise critical consciousness in language learners while teaching English communicatively, contextually and creatively (aiming to achieve 4C).

Language education is dominated by the abundant use of commercial global and national coursebooks, which promote Anglo-American or national ideologies, represent mostly middle or upper-class values and erase marginalized groups. This dominance has reached such a level that we can hardly imagine another way of designing/writing/producing/using language materials. In this website, we aim to show language learners, teachers, teacher educators, materials writers, publishers, researchers and all other interested parties that an alternative critical way of language education is possible with the tools we produced. We believe that language learning/teaching materials, especially non-profit, open-access materials such as ours, do not necessarily have to reproduce the capitalist, imperialist, classist, heterosexist, racist, colonial, consumerist, ableist, linguicist social lives we are surrounded by. Instead, critical language materials can include all those marginalized, problematize human rights violations, femicide, animal abuse, authoritarianism, climate crisis, etc. and call language learners/teachers for action. By publicizing these materials, we offer ready to use materials to educators, and we hope to set an example for similar projects. We got our inspiration from Dr. Bonny Norton and their open-access resource Storybooks Canada. We would like to thank Dr. Bonny Norton for her suggestion to launch such a website and make these materials open-access.

We hope using and designing critical pedagogic materials will enable co-constructing dialogic classrooms where students and teachers collaboratively problematize issues relevant to their lives and reflect on ways to change the oppressive, unjust and unequal policies, practices and discourses around them. Despite the pain some of the topics we covered invoked in us, we enjoyed preparing, editing, using and sharing these resources, for we believe in the possibility of transformation. We hope you will enjoy them, too.