Teacher Language Awareness

Abstract

The term teacher language awareness (TLA) refers to teachers’ cognitions (knowledge and beliefs) about language in general and the language they teach. TLA research considers how these cognitions are developed and their impact on teaching and learning. An underlying assumption is that conscious knowledge about language facilitates language development, whether in the mother tongue or subsequent languages, and hence that language teachers need such knowledge (TLA) in order to facilitate their students’ learning. The chapter focuses in particular on language teachers’ subject-matter knowledge.Research has revealed the complexity ofTLA. The language teacher is at the same time language user, analyst, and teacher (Edge, ELT Journal 42(1), 9–13, 1988). To carry out those three roles successfully, teachers need well-developed language proficiency plus conscious (declarative) TLA and the ability to draw on that declarative knowledge when enacting the curriculum in the language classroom (Andrews, Teacher language awareness, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007). TLA research explores the interrelationships between these three components and other factors that influence TLA development. Examples include studies on the impact of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about grammar on their teaching (Borg, Teacher cognition and language edu- cation: research and practice, Continuum, London, 2006) and work on the development of TLA through consciousness raising in teacher education (Wright and Bolitho, ELT Journal, 47(4), 292–304, 1993; Svalberg and Askham, Language Awareness, 23(1/2), 122–136, 2014). One ofthe challenges for researchers is the difficulty ofestablishing empirically the link between TLA and the facilitation of language learning. Future research is likely to be influenced by new conceptions oflanguage as complex and dynamic and should consider in greater depth the importance of affective and identity issues in the development of TLA.