This article reports a project that I carried out with prospective Maltese language teachers in order to give them the opportunity to examine their linguistic landscape (LL), to develop an awareness and a curiosity about how languages are used in house names, and to reflect on their own learning. The student-teachers adopted visual ethnography to…

Numerous second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have tried to define grammatical difficulty in second and foreign language acquisition--often as part of an attempt to relate the efficacy of different types of instruction to the degree of difficulty of grammatical structures. The resulting proliferation of definitions and the lack of a…

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 few,…

Previous research into student teachers' knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated the…

A major challenge for language teacher educators working in the area of teacher language awareness (TLA) is to develop pedagogical approaches that will go beyond merely enhancing L2 teachers' knowledge about language by enabling them to make the bridge between the declarative and procedural dimensions of TLA. This paper sets out to investigate the…

It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (CL) provides tools that may help the language-teaching practitioner to gain insight into the semantic potential of words and communicate the meaning of lexical chunks in greater detail…

This article attempts to recontextualise the dimensions of teacher language awareness (LA) highlighted by Svalberg ((2007) "Language awareness and language learning." "Language Teaching," 40, 287-308) by emphasising the role of pedagogy in achieving coherence in language education across the subjects of English (L1) and Modern…

A recent practice in the study of language on teacher education programmes has been the use of electronic corpora, and we are therefore still at the initial stages of exploring key issues relating to their integration. Despite arguments for and against their adaptation, there is a dearth of evaluative research examining student teachers'…

Reports on a project in which an English and a French student teacher work collaboratively to develop their personal knowledge and understanding of grammar and its role in teaching both subjects to 11-year-old learners in an English comprehensive school. Ways in which the cross-language focus beneficially influenced their classroom practice are…

This paper derives from the innovative language teacher education programme described in a previous article published in "Language Learning Journal" (Burley & Pomphrey, 2002). It outlines the development in student teachers' understanding of their role as language educators through an analysis of the beginning and end of this…