Page 174 - Beyond Methods

162 Fostering language awareness
While, as Nunan observes, the teacher’s reply is “hardly encourag- ing,” it highlights the need for incorporating a focus on language awareness in teacher education programs.
Reflective task 7.4
Do you approve of the way the teacher handled the student’s question in the above episode? Why/why not? What are the different ways of responding to this question—if your objective is to create general language awareness?
Language Awareness of Language Teachers
A conscious awareness of the way the language they are teaching works and the way it is used is absolutely essential for teachers whether they are native speakers or non-native speakers. Most na- tive speaking teachers, having unconsciously mastered their L1 in their childhood, may know the underlying system of their language intuitively, but they may lack explicit knowledge needed to give a proper explanation. Most non-native speaking teachers may have consciously learned their L2 and learned about it as well, but still may lack adequate competence and confidence in it.
Emphasizing the need for creating language awareness among language teachers, Scott Thornbury (1997, p. xii) correctly cautions that teachers’ limited knowledge of language may result in “a failure on the part of the teacher to anticipate learners’ learning problems and a consequent inability to plan lessons that are pitched at the right level; an inability to interpret course book syllabuses and materials and to adapt these to the specific needs of the learners; an inability to deal satisfactorily with errors, or to field learners’ queries; and a general failure to earn the confidence of the learners due to a lack of basic terminology and ability to present new lan- guage clearly and efficiently.” In order to address these concerns, Thornbury (1997) has written a book, About Language: Tasks for Teachers of English, consisting of nearly three hundred tasks start- ing with phonemes and progressing through words, phrases, sen- tences, and complete texts.
Taking a different approach, Leo van Lier (1996) has called for Language Awareness in Teacher Education (LATE) based not on