Language Awareness and ELF Perceptions of Chinese University Students

Abstract

Language awareness (LA) has long enjoyed a high status in language education (see Carter 2003, Hawkins 1992). In a broad sense, LA encapsulates ‘knowledge about language’ or justified truth about language (see Carter 2003: 64). With a traditional focus-on-form orientation (see Richards and Rodgers 2001), LA ‘could be glossed as a sensitivity to grammatical, lexical, or phonological features, and the effect on meaning brought about by the use of different forms’ (Hales 1997: 217). Following this, ways have been explored to help second language (L2) learners to attend to features and rules of the English used by its monolingual native speakers in the undertaking of English language teaching (ELT). For instance, Callies and Keller (2008: 249) note that ‘native speakers do not use linguistic structures randomly’ and make a case for the role of explicit instruction in helping German learners of English to notice linguistic devices used by native English speakers (NESs) for highlighting information in discourse. While many studies on LA are traditionally confined to grammar (e.g., Andrews 1997: 149; Svalberg 2001; Valeo 2013), recent LA research has expanded beyond linguistic forms to cover areas such as pragmatics, culture and pedagogy (e.g., Cross 2010; Murray 2010; Porto 2010). Despite various research interests, the traditional LA approach is mainly focused on knowledge about the English used by NESs and connected with the conventions generated in the monolingual context of NESs. This appears to be limited through the lens of English as a lingua franca (ELF), a research field emerging in response to the globalisation of English. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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