Linguistic awareness and writing: Exploring the relationship with language awareness

This paper explores the inter‐relationships between linguistic awareness and language awareness with regard to second‐language teaching and learning. In the second‐language classroom, language awareness, as an interface mechanism, promotes heightened awareness of language forms between the first language (L1) and the target language (TL) and thereby assists language learning. Linguistic awareness refers to the learners’ reflection on and manipulation of the language code. This paper proposes that findings from research studies on linguistic awareness can inform practices in language awareness. One such study is provided here as an example. This particular study examines the relationship between linguistic awareness and writing in two groups of college students. In one group, data were collected in French (L1) and in English (L2). In the second group, data were collected in English (L1). Linguistic awareness was measured by means of two tasks: acceptability judgements and mazed‐reading. The writing task, an essay, was designed to measure decontextualised writing (explicit contextualisation). While this study is situated in psycholinguistic theory, the findings call for explanations grounded cognitively, socially and culturally. These explanations provide richer and thicker descriptions of the contributions of the study to a deeper understanding of language awareness.