Awareness Matters

Book excerpt: 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.