Language Awareness at School: A Practical Guide for Teachers and School Leaders

All too often, schools make decisions about language without a proper understanding of the issues involved. Language Awareness at School addresses this problem by exploring a range of topics related to language, helping teachers to make informed choices about how to best support their students in becoming more confident, aware speakers and writers.

Written in collaboration by an academic linguist and an experienced teacher, this essential book combines professional experience and academic expertise to demonstrate how a language-aware approach to education has the potential to transform both whole-school policy and classroom practice.

Chapters explore such questions as the misconceptions surrounding the use of ‘Standard English’, teachers’ and students’ local accents, the development of cross-curricular speaking and writing skills and how to reinvigorate Modern Foreign Languages. This book also works to undo damaging prejudices about how students speak, instead highlighting opportunities to encourage students to notice, examine and debate language issues.

Language Awareness at School is a crucial read for all teachers, trainee teachers and school leadership teams who want to make more informed decisions regarding language issues in schools.

Tim Marr is Visiting Professor in Applied Linguistics at Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia. He was formerly director of the MA TESOL programme at London Metropolitan University and has over 30 years’ experience in teaching and researching language and linguistics, as well as training language teachers. He has co-authored several books on linguistics and TESOL.

Steve Collins is Head of English at Bishop Luffa School, Chichester, where he teaches Key Stages 3 to 5, specialising in A Level English Language. He has taught in secondary schools for 20 years, and also taught EFL in Peru and the UK. He contributed a chapter on sentence-level analysis to the Routledge book Teaching English Language and Literature 16–19.