This article states that in order to exercise citizenship with responsibility, language teachers need to popularize a discourse for criticism in which students and teachers transcend tacit knowledge and common sense due to meta-cognition and argumentation and reach systematic knowledge and procedures posed by experts in the different disciplines. As illustrated inside, the source and objective of analysis by means of which this discourse can be contextualized in language teaching is "the language of mass media" and all the sociocultural and signifying practices that it invokes. We conclude that through the analysis of mass media it is possible to educate students with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to interact critically in the world.