Critical approaches to conspiracy theories in the EAL classroom. Deconstructing the great replacement theory

In recent years, disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories have challenged the development of a healthy approach to understanding news and information in the public sphere. In particular, conspiracy theories circulating on social media and in political discourse consist of false or deceptive information, camouflaged as true facts, which is disseminated with socially disruptive aims. Like all disinformation, conspiracy theorists manipulate facts through a series of complex discursive strategies, urging a critical approach to their construal, not only for native speakers of English, but even more crucially for students of English as an additional language (EAL) (Filmer, 2022). This chapter responds to the call for post-truth pedagogies by reporting on research carried out on a class of EAL postgraduates in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa. Following the theoretical and didactic approach to Critical Literacy (Janks & Locke, 2008; Janks, 2013), students were introduced to a critical discourse analysis toolkit (Machin & Mayr, 2023) with which they were subsequently asked to carry out a guided written task examining the discursive strategies employed in an online news text supporting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The results showed that students were able to identify a number of manipulative discourse strategies found in the text and could critically assess them in the wider socio-political context of current debates on immigration.