Language Awareness: definition, scope, and broader relevance

Notes

• Subtopic: What is Language Awareness? What is language awareness? In Molière’s play *Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme*, Monsieur Jourdain was famously unaware that he was speaking ‘prose’—until it was pointed out to him. He may have been equally surprised to know that he was speaking ‘grammar,’ for example, or that he was pronouncing ‘phonemes,’ or that he was producing ‘discourse.’ Most speakers of a language are similarly vague when it comes to identifying what it is they implicitly know about their language; Chomsky termed this their ‘competence.’ It usually requires someone to point it out to them—to make it explicit. This is what language awareness is: explicit knowledge of language. • Subtopic: Scope and Interpretation of Language Awareness But, so simply defined, the term allows for many interpretations. In the first, the linguistic domain, for example, the notion of language awareness is broad, encompassing the sociolinguistic and cultural domains as well. In the words of the Language Council for Language in Education Working Party on Language Awareness: “Language Awareness is a person’s sensitivity to and conscious awareness of the nature of language and its role in human life.”...