Language awareness in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article surveys the field of language awareness in the Netherlands. The first section outlines the history of language awareness in Holland, tracing it back to a late nineteenth‐century reform movement. The second section deals with language awareness in the teaching of Dutch as a native language. Two approaches to language awareness are distinguished here, a functional and a cultural one. The third section gives a brief account of what language awareness means in the context of Dutch as a second language. The notion of metalinguistic awareness is introduced. The fourth section describes language awareness as it originated and evolved in foreign‐language education. In the last section the conclusion is reached that language awareness is still very much a phenomenon at the periphery of Dutch language education.