Undergraduate students in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain completed a questionnaire seeking their views about native speaker teachers (NST) and nonnative speaker teachers (NNSTs) on rating scales relating to language skills, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, learning strategies, culture, and civilization, attitudes and assessment.…

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…

Examines the ways in which teachers' language awareness affects their pedagogical practice. Considers the relationship between teacher language awareness and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Proposes a model in which the second language teacher's language awareness is seen as a sub-component of PCK, forming a bridge between content knowledge…

Investigates to what extent Turkish teacher trainees had learned about pragmalinguistics even though it was found to be under represented in their course of study. A questionnaire was administered to gain information about the awareness of trainees of expressing themselves appropriately in different contexts. (Author/VWL)

EFL students of English literature face the substantial challenge of making sense of literary texts written in a foreign language. EFL teachers working with these students need to understand the problems that they face and develop ways of helping them to overcome them. This article focuses on metaphor in literature and on whether awareness raising…

Explores the relationship between Hong Kong secondary school English teachers' metalinguistic awareness and the ability to explain a grammar point. Teachers of different backgrounds and experience were asked to role play a grammar point on two separate occasions; videotapes of the role plays were transcribed and analyzed. (13 references)…

Examines the importance in the instructed-learning setting of the second-language teacher's "knowledge about language" or metalinguistic awareness. Discusses three questions: (1) Do teachers need to know about language?; (2) if so, why and in what ways; and (3) what impact does the level of a teacher's metalinguistic awareness have on the input…

Awareness of structures may be conscious or unconscious in the expert user of a language: this paper contends that insufficient conscious awareness of a language structure in teachers of English may impair the teaching and learning of that structure, even when considerable classroom time is invested in it. Phrasal verbs are extensively covered in…

This paper reports preliminary findings from a 1988 Hampshire (England) schools research project in which primary and secondary school teachers with special responsibility for language teaching were interviewed to discover their views on the place of explicit knowledge about language (KAL) in the school language curriculum and on possible…

Argues for the use of computer-stored corpora in courses in grammar awareness for teachers of mother-tongue English. It is suggested that the ability to do grammar entails a set of skills rather than a body of knowledge and that corpora provide excellent data for doing grammar. Questions regarding the comparison of different methodologies are…

Discusses an in-depth investigation into the metalinguistic awareness of a group of practicing second language teachers, all nonnative speakers teaching English in Hong Kong secondary schools. The investigation focuses on teacher metalinguistic awareness as it relates to grammar. (Author/VWL)

With the growing acknowledgement of the importance of pragmatic competence in second language (L2) learning, language researchers have identified the comprehension of speech acts as they occur in natural conversation as essential to communicative competence (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Thomas, 1983). Nonconventional indirect speech acts are formed…

Current research on language learning makes many claims about the potential benefits of small group work in L2 classrooms. With the relatively recent emphasis on students' perspectives, there is now a growing number of investigations that focus on learners' beliefs about the language classroom. In this study, 21 students and their teachers…

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…

Discusses the need for a systematic approach to phonology in language teacher training, outlining the deficiencies in the current "atomistic" approach to phonology in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instruction and suggesting that a holistic approach will provide teachers with a better understanding of the sound systems of the…