The paper focuses on the development of teacher thinking, specifically L2 teachers' subject-matter cognitions, i.e. their Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) (see e.g. Andrews 2001, 2003). The study examines the evolving TLA, as it relates to grammar, of three teachers, each a graduate with more than 10 years' experience of teaching English in Hong…

This paper aims to shed light on the explicit-implicit paradigm contention in connection with the foreign language area of English spelling. To this end, it frames the subject against the backdrop of the prolonged dispute between implicit, whole language, top-down, or whole-to-part approaches and explicit, traditional, bottom-up, or part-to-whole…

This study is a modest attempt to use three Korean primary school children and their English diaries as go-betweens to mediate in an apparent dispute between the founding fathers of socio-cultural theory about the nature of language and language awareness. According to Bruner, Vygotsky holds that mediation by others and self-mediation of written…

Based on the premise that teachers gain useful insights by considering what students notice when evaluating a written text, this pilot project reports on the implementation of an evaluative activity with one group of students and considers the implications of the results for classroom practice. Thirteen students in a university-level Spanish…

This paper reports on a study which investigated the language-related experiences of Afrikaans-speaking South African immigrants living in New Zealand. In-depth narrative interviews with 14 parents of children aged 18 and under were conducted in various geographical locations across New Zealand. The focus was on their perceptions of their…

This paper explores the sociolinguistic awareness in English of tertiary level students in Hong Kong and Wuhan (Mainland China). The language data consisted of specific instances when a native speaker presenter made changes, in the course of oral delivery, to the written text of a conference paper that she had prepared in advance. Matched pairs of…

This paper examines visual and affective factors involved in the reading of foreign language texts. It draws on the results of a pilot study among students of post-compulsory school stage studying French in England. Through a detailed analysis of students' reactions to texts, it demonstrates that the use of "authentic" documents under currently…

Metalanguage is a term that is increasingly to be found in the applied linguistic/language awareness literature. However, not all writers use it in the same way; some seem to be equating it with metalinguistic terminology. Tracing the term from its philosophical roots, this paper accepts a broader definition of metalanguage as "language about…

This paper looks at the employment of metalanguage by advanced English L2 users engaged in Dictogloss, a form-focused collaborative writing task, and compares it with that in an earlier study of intermediate learners. First, three commonly employed types of metalinguistic terms are recognised, listed and compared with those reported in a study of…

Traditional psycholinguistic approaches to metalinguistic awareness in L1 learners elicit responses containing metalanguage that demonstrates metalinguistic awareness of predetermined aspects of language knowledge. This paper, which takes a more ethnographic approach, demonstrates how pupils are able to engage their own focus of metalanguage when…

The increase of multilingualism in both natural and formal contexts has provoked a number of studies which have concentrated on providing evidence of multilingual processing and finding out about the differences and similarities between second and third language learning. This paper deals with the use of metalanguage in multilingual students in an…

This paper investigates L2 English learners' reactions to mixed personality in a pedagogic grammar. Personality refers to how authors represent themselves in a text and interact with their readers (e.g. personally via the use of personal pronouns or impersonally via the use of the passive, etc.); mixed personality occurs when an author switches…

This paper reports research designed to highlight how three groups of teachers make sense of linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity in the classroom. The collecting of the data concentrated on the way in which the participants in the study worked together to construct socially negotiated meanings of linguistic diversity within the context of…

Few issues in second language teaching have generated as much controversy as that of error correction. In fact, one of the most discouraging experiences of L2 teachers is correcting errors especially those that recur in their students' production. A possible explanation may be the mismatch between what teachers and students consider to be…

This paper investigates the development of L2 Spanish students' cultural awareness through the teaching of literature by the application of the method Focus-on-Cultural Understanding. The paper partially reports on a one-semester study in which 17 intermediate L2 Spanish students at a state university in Midwestern US were exposed to a variety of…