Language Awareness

Language awareness (LA) is knowledge about language and also a movement with an ideological stance towards language related issues, and an approach to teaching and learning languages. The chapter describes and discusses LA from both theoretical and practical perspectives, in EFL, ESL, English Mother Tongue and World Languages contexts. It places LA in a historical and social context, relating it to concerns about low literacy and uptake of Modern Languages in UK Schools and, more widely, to population movements and changing linguistic landscapes around the world. Relevant research is reviewed and related to LA issues. How LA may be developed through engagement with language is discussed and the complexity of this learning process described in some detail and related to constructs such as for example ‘noticing’ and ‘languaging’. This leads to a discussion of what is known about language teachers’ LA, its importance, and how it may be developed. For language teachers and teacher educators, the chapter provides examples of LA as a teaching approach, discussing the underlying principles and some of the classroom activities and techniques used in LA classrooms, including textual enhancement and the use of corpus material and other types of authentic text.