The paper investigates how a student on a master's-level teacher education course for English language teachers goes about constructing her grammar knowledge. The learner is a novice teacher with English as a foreign language. Learner diary, interview, and group interaction data were analysed thematically, revealing that she made relatively…

As the speakership of English worldwide continues to grow, English language teachers are required to devise ways to prepare their learners for communicating successfully across cultures. As pragmatics is particularly tied up with culture, the ways in which individuals from different cultures will orient to pragmatic phenomena in their interaction…

Given the cross-cultural differences underlying interactional routines such as "How are you?" or "How was your weekend?", managing such routine inquiries can be problematic for second language learners. Based on data from an adult ESL (English as a second language) class, this conversation analytic study shows how learners develop their competence…

This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article "Selective listening" regarding whether nouns are "privileged" in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown suggests it might be. The…

The following contribution is a meta-analysis of the language awareness discipline from a practical application point of view. It is based on a keynote speech at the "10th International Conference of the Association for Language Awareness," and deals with the implications of business requirements for language use in communication processes. The…

This paper considers the case of Intercultural Understanding (IU) as a component part of foreign language learning and teaching in the upper stage of primary schools (roughly ages 7-11 years) in the UK. It is set within a specific context of curriculum innovation, namely recent policy changes which have introduced IU as a key part of primary…

By drawing upon the dialogic theory of Bakhtin, I consider how register variation is represented in the children's books by the popular Greek writer Dr. Eugene Trivizas, with the aim to explore whether, and in what terms, it could be exploited for the raising of (critical) language awareness. Most sociolinguistic studies which have used literature…

As part of the attempts to revitalise Corsican, a regional language of France, and to reverse the language shift to French, language activists and academics have sought to apply the model of a polynomic language to what is considered as one language, but what is, in fact, a number of different Corsicans, each with varying levels of mutual…

We examined the relationship between the quality of second language (L2) learners' language awareness (as shown through dialogue journal entries) and the quality of their L2 pronunciation (as assessed through listener-based ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency). The participants were 10 students enrolled in a 13-week…

This article examines how majority-language teachers coping with additive education view their roles in a bilingual framework, how they perceive issues of culture and language in young bilingual children, and how they understand the term "bilingual education" in an L2 non-additive context. The study has been conducted in the context of pre-school…

In "Language awareness and language learning" (Svalberg, 2007) I concluded that the otherwise diverse and multidisciplinary field of language awareness (LA) is given coherence by its focus on engagement with language. I argued that LA is seen as active and not merely as a state of conscious awareness or sensitivity. This paper goes one step…

In this study, we compare the first and the last sessions from an online oral proficiency course aimed at doctoral students conducted in the virtual world Second Life. The study attempts to identify how supportive moves made by the teacher encourage learners to engage with language, and what type of linguistic behaviour in the learners leads to…

This paper examines the difficulty in reading French experienced by English students at Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS), taken at age 17, and the need for vocabulary learning to assist comprehension. Research has shown that intermediate learners need knowledge of some 5000 word families, and that specifications for the General Certificate of…

Most research on language awareness in a second language (L2) has been carried out with adult learners. This research presents data showing that pedagogical techniques can be devised enabling children as young as 8 to develop metalinguistic awareness of their emerging L2 system. Building on existing work by Canadian researchers, this…

This paper is concerned with young people's perceptions and reported use of the two language varieties that co-exist in the urban centre of Guangzhou in southern China, Putonghua (P) and Cantonese (C). P is a typical H-variety, promoted by the government and used as a lingua franca throughout China; C is the local L-variety but it also has some…