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Introduction
The contributions to this special issue represent a selection of papers presented at the 10th International Conference of the Association for Language Awareness (ALA), held at the University of Kassel, Germany, 25ā28 July 2010. The conference theme was āAwareness matters: language, culture, literacyā.
Previous ALA conferences were held in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Spain, France, and Hong Kong. The 2010 location, Kassel, Germany, is in the heart of the European Union (EU) ā a setting which raises many language awareness issues. The EU has 23 official languages and a language policy which promotes multilingualism. The aim is that every EU citizen should speak at least two foreign languages in addition to their mother tongue. This is more successfully achieved in some member states than in others. The EU also has more than 60 indigenous regional or minority language communities. In some contexts, a greater awareness of the value of such linguistic and cultural diversity is needed.
The approximately 200 conference presentations represented a global perspective, from around 50 different countries and 4 continents. The conference also promoted the development of young academics, with a specific paper strand for novice researchers.
The papers in this issue include two plenary speeches. One is the Eric Hawkins Lecture, presented at Kassel by Michael Byram. Eric Hawkins, who passed away on 31 October 2010, was one of the founding fathers of the language awareness movement and of the ALA. In 2004, the Association decided to honour him by designating the main keynote paper at future conferences āThe Eric Hawkins Lectureā (James, 2005, p. 81).
In his paper, Michael Byram discusses the relationship between cultural awareness and language awareness and, very much in the spirit of Eric Hawkins, emphasises the importance of culture teaching: āin the best cases, language and culture teaching produces, through the development of linguistic and intercultural competence, alternative conceptualisations of the world and contributes to the education/Bildung of the individual in society.ā
The second plenary paper included in this issue was presented by Reinhard HĆ¼nerberg and Andrea Geile. It, in contrast, examines language awareness from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The authors, who are business and marketing experts, argue that ālanguage use awarenessā has the potential to make an important difference to the adequacy and efficiency of business communication.
The remaining contributions are research papers covering a range of important areas, including peer interaction, metacognitive awareness, skills training, and the value and challenges of bilingual/multilingual contexts.
Both Wasyl Cajkler and Bernadette Hall, and Beth Martin, are concerned with primary schooling. Cajkler and Hall investigate the language capability of new teachers in linguistically and culturally superdiverse UK classrooms. They reach the conclusion that the language capability of the teachers is largely untapped but has the potential to be a valuable resource for schools.
Martin explores what involvement in bilingual education programmes means to primary school children. The children in the study produce ālanguage silhouettesā (Krumm & Jenkins, 2001), reflecting their linguistic and personal identities. Differences between children whose languages are supported or not by the school are revealed. It also emerges that bilingual schooling seems to have an effect on the childrenās abstract thinking.
Three papers are concerned with the effect of strategy training. Claudia Finkbeiner, Markus Knierim, Marc Smasal and Peter Ludwig adopt a micro-analytic approach in their study of German learnersā group work on cooperative English reading tasks. They are able to distinguish between learner-adequate and situation-adequate use of strategies, and also show that teachers need a greater awareness of learning strategies in order to better support the learners.
Victoria Zenotz also investigates reading but focuses on training Spanish learners to bridge the gap between paper reading and on-screen reading of English. Training appears to have a positive effect not on which strategies are used or how often, but on the quality of strategy use.
Zohreh Seifoori and Zahra Vahidiās paper, in contrast, is concerned with fluency strategy training. Their participants are Iranian learners of English. Their main concern, and achievement, is overcoming the frequently noted trade-off effect whereby greater fluency tends to result in lesser accuracy.
Teachersā language awareness is the area addressed by Ralf GieĆler, who wonders whether and how cognitive linguistics might help teachers gain an understanding of English prepositions and particles, which can then inform their teaching. A small-scale study shows both the potential of the approach and some of the challenges.
Two of the papers are concerned with peer interaction as such. In Agneta Svalbergās study, an attempt is made to enhance student teachersā peer interaction by the introduction of a cooperative mode of working. The studentsā perceptions of unstructured versus cooperative group work are analysed with regard to their engagement with language. Role assignment and a ban on students forming monolingual groups appear to increase task focus and active participation, but it also increases learner anxiety.
The paper by Masatoshi Sato and Susan Ballinger also deals with peer interaction. It is brave and original in bringing together quantitative and qualitative studies from two very different contexts, Japan and Canada, and different learner age groups. The researchers attempt to enhance both the language awareness and the peer interaction skills of the participants by training. The two studies show that corrective feedback can be trained, turning peers into learning resources for each other.
The contributions by Joanna White and Marlise Horst, and of Nausica Marcos Miguel, consider the relationship between the first and the second language. The Francophone learners of English in the White and Horstās paper were trained in recognising FrenchāEnglish cognates. The training was perceived as enjoyable and appeared to be effective, especially for less obvious cognates. Marcos Miguelās participants were adult English-speaking learners of Spanish. The study explores the grapho-morphological awareness of the students and the extent to which it is influenced by their first language.
The papers in this special issue will give the reader a flavour of the very enjoyable and successful 2010 ALA Conference at the University of Kassel, Germany.1 Hopefully, the contributions will stimulate new language awareness questions and research, and inspire language awareness practice.
Note
1.Ā Ā We are very grateful to Meike Machunsky for helping us keep track of papers and reviews while we were putting this issue together.
References
James, C. (2005). Eric Hawkins: A tribute on your ninetieth birthday. Language Awareness, 14(2ā3), 80ā81.
Krumm, H.-J., & Jenkins, E.-M. (2001). Kinder und ihre sprachen ā Lebendige mehrsprachigkeit. sprachenportraits [Children and their language ā Living multililingualism. Language portraits]. Vienna: Wiener VerlagsWerkstatt fĆ¼r Interkulturelles Lernen und Deutsch als Fremdsprache [The Viennese Publishing Workshop for Intercultural Learning and German as a Foreign Language].
Claudia Finkbeiner
School of Humanities, English Department
University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
Agneta M.-L. Svalberg
School of Education
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
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Language awareness and (critical) cultural awareness ā relationships, comparisons and contrasts
Michael Byram
School of Education, Durham University, Durham, UK
The vexed question of the relationship between ālanguageā and ācultureā will be the starting point. I do not propose to āresolveā the question but to consider some ways in which relationships between cultural awareness and language awareness might be conceptualised and then have some impact on language education. By ālanguage educationā I refer to the teaching and learning of all languages in a curriculum, whether this be the synchronic experienced curriculum of a learner at a given point in time or the diachronic curriculum of their lifelong learning. I will draw on the Council of Europeās concept and platform for āLanguages in Education, Languages of Educationā and plurilingual and intercultural education to provide an overview of the issues involved. Finally, I will consider the impact on teaching and learning in practice by suggesting that, in the best cases, language and culture teaching produces, through the development of linguistic and intercultural competence, alternative conceptualisations of the world and contributes to the education/Bildung of the individual in society.
I first got to know Eric Hawkins when I was a secondary school teacher of French and German in the 1970s. I attended one of the courses he and his colleagues organised at the University of York. The course was a complex tandem-based experience. Half the participants were French teachers of English and half were English teachers of French. Sometimes we worked in French/English groups or pairs, sometimes in English-only or French-only groups. It was extremely stimulating and enjoyable, and reflected the commitment of the York team under Eric to engage directly with teachers.
My next opportunity to work with Eric came a little later but when I had just moved from teaching to teacher training and had been experimenting with work in what I later learnt to call ālanguage awarenessā, or what Eric prefers to call āawareness of languageā. Having written a short paper about this (Byram, 1978),1 I was invited to join a working group under John Trimās chairmanship at the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT; see Donmall, 1985) which included Eric and several others. It was a wonderful experience to see how two major figures ā Eric and John ā worked with newcomers such as myself. They encouraged and respected what we said and wrote, and this was just another instance of how Eric quietly and gently helped people to think differently about languages and language teaching. As for many others, Eric Hawkins has been for me a person to emulate for his commitment to language teaching practice infused by scholarship and research.
The focus of this paper will be on the relationship between the language awareness and the cultural awareness dimension. This will include the question of criticality in language awareness and in cultural awareness, and eventually, this will lead me to make a further link between critical language and cultural awareness on the one hand and education for citizenship on the other.
The starting point for comparing language awareness and cultural awareness ought to be in the relationship of language and culture.2 This is a notoriously difficult issue, but it has been dealt with for foreign language teaching by Karen Risager (2006). The argument and analysis are complex but it is important to note that she analyses the relationship from three perspectives:
ā¢ First, linguistic practice or the sociological perspective, where language and culture are separable ā people use the same language in different contexts to refer to and express different contents ā this is most evident in the use of English and Englishes but is also found in other languages.
ā¢ Second, linguistic resources or the psychological perspective where, in the life of the individual person, language and culture or, better, cultural experience, are inseparable for that individual and are ultimately unique to the individual.
ā¢ Third, linguistic system, where we might analyse and describe the grammar of a language but there is no necessary relationship to a cultural context; such a relationship is only present and created in linguistic practice.
For the purposes of comparing and relating language awareness and cultural awareness ā I shall use these terms rather than āawareness of languageā or āawareness of cultureā, which would be more elegant ā it is Risagerās first and second dimensions, the sociological and the psychological ā especially with respect to matters of social identity ā which are significant.
Language awareness is defined in the Association of Language Awareness as āexplicit knowledge about language and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language useā (Garrett & James, 2000, p. 330). This is, as Garrett and James say, a broad definition and allows a range of approaches. In the following, I will use the term to refer to a personās conscious attention to language or culture and, importantly, their engagement with these. I will return to the question of engagement later.
In the first instance, this means, following Risager, that individuals pay attention, first, to language and culture in the social context, and second, to language and culture in their own lives, in their own psychology. But it is more than paying attention. It also involves analysis of, and learning about, language and culture, and crucially the relationship between the two. In other words, someone who is āawareā of ālanguage and cultureā and the languageāculture nexus is able to reflect on this nexus as it exists in society and in their own selves.
There is now a long tradition of teaching to develop language awareness, and there is a growing tradition of teaching to develop cultural awareness. The latter has been helped by definitions of intercultural competence, defined succinctly by Guilherme as āthe ability to interact effectively with people from cultures that we recognise as being different from our ownā (2000, p. 297). The concept has been further elaborated in a range of models, many of which have been included in a categorisation by Spitzberg and Changnon in a recent Handbook of Intercultural Competence edited by Deardorff. However, when Spitzberg and Changnon get to my model (Byram, 1997), what they miss in their analysis is the centrality of cultural awareness, or more exactly, critical cultural awareness. They change the diagram produced originally wherein critical cultural awareness is symbolically in the centre (Byram, 1997, p. 34, Figure 1) and simply place it around the edge of the circle (which they turn into a square), giving it the same position and significance as other aspects of intercultural competence (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009, p. 17). I will return to this when I t...
