Awareness Matters

This collection argues that being aware of and reflecting on language form and language use is a powerful tool, not only in language learning, but also in wider society. It adopts an interdisciplinary stance: one chapter argues the need for Language Awareness in business contexts, while another examines the role of critical cultural awareness and Language Awareness in education as ‘bildung’. Others report on research studies in language classrooms and in teacher education. Language Awareness is interrogated from a range of perspectives such as peer interaction, teaching young learners, learner strategies and strategies for writing, online reading, and oral fluency training. The scope is global, including contributions from Canada, Germany, Iran, Japan, Spain, and the UK, and covers bilingual as well as multilingual contexts. The book will be of interest to language teachers, language teacher educators, other language professionals, and generally to the language aware.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Language Awareness.

Agneta Svalberg teaches and supervises on Master’s and Doctoral courses in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Leicester, UK. She is particularly interested in grammar, both in language teaching and learning and from a theoretical perspective (in particular tense-modality-aspect). In her teaching of English grammar to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers she uses a Language Awareness-raising approach. Her research focuses on Engagement with Language.

Claudia Finkbeiner is a full professor of EFL research and intercultural communication. Her research areas are EFL, multilingual and multicultural learning and teaching. She has conducted research projects, published and given lectures around the world on reading, reading strategies and reading interest, literacy development, intercultural communication, language awareness and cultural awareness, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), computer assisted and blended learning and has published in numerous journals and books She has been president of the Association for Language Awareness since 2006.