We are happy to present the special conference issue of the journal Language Awareness based on outstanding papers presented at the 12th International Conference of the Association for Language Awareness in Hamar, Norway, 1–4 July 2014. The conference was hosted by Hedmark University College, Faculty of Education and Natural Sciences, with 170 delegates from 40 different nations. In addition to the 130 conference presentations and five plenary sessions, this conference also included a pre-conference doctoral symposium for PhD students, offering an opportunity for novice researchers to engage with peers and senior scholars.
The year 2014 marked the 20th anniversary of ALA and this invited us to look back on what has been accomplished in research on various aspects of linguistic awareness and consciousness since the birth of the association, as well as to draw attention to possible research avenues in the years ahead. Hence, the theme chosen for this conference was ‘Language Awareness – Achievements and Challenges’.
Before introducing the content of the issue, we would like to thank the people who in different ways have contributed to this publication. These are, first of all, the 50 authors who sent in their manuscripts and the corps of peer reviewers who helped us select the articles that finally were to be included in the journal. Our gratitude also goes to the publisher and to Jonna Gilbert in particular for excellent cooperation throughout the process. Finally, we thank the Association for Language Awareness and the regular editors of the journal for giving us the opportunity to be guest editors.
The first article of this issue is based on Agneta Svalberg's ALA 2014 Eric Hawkins Lecture. Here she takes as her point of departure Eric Hawkins' vision from 40 years ago of language awareness as a linking element between subjects in the school curriculum and a way to advance literacy and to foster tolerance and inclusion in society. She finds these thoughts just as relevant today with increased transnational mobility and economic instability. In the UK, the level of language awareness in schools and universities still leaves much to be desired, and foreign language learning is in crisis. A deficit model is applied to the immigrant populations, and their linguistic competencies are largely ignored. From this, Svalberg goes on to discuss the status of language awareness research through an examination of articles published in Language Awareness during the five most recent years, identifying topics and approaches and highlighting examples of research projects from different parts of the world. At the end of the article, she points to pressing tasks for language awareness research.
The other articles illustrate the thematic and methodological breadth of current language awareness research worldwide. Topics range from the role of conscious awareness for the mastery of stylistic variation and language awareness in language play to the construction of linguistic norms and variation in complex urban multiethnic and multilingual settings and the relationship between language aptitude and working memory. Awareness of linguistic features at phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels is examined, focusing on form and function, plus factors in the situational or the wider societal context. Several studies are concerned with awareness of language learning strategies. The data come from early elementary school, lower and upper secondary school as well as university-level students, and include transcripts of interviews and group discussions, transcripts of audio- and video-recordings, field notes, think-aloud protocols, questionnaires, speaker evaluations and test results. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are represented, and the theoretical framework is drawn from areas like cognitive psychology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, folk linguistics, reading research, and research on learning strategies.
The notion ‘target language’ is reconsidered in Ellen Bijvoet and Kari Fraurud's folk linguistic investigation of young, multicultural Stockholmers, as the authors show that what people regard as ‘good’ language is more heterogeneous than often assumed. Through a listener study, they analyse attitude scales, variety labelling, and assessments of speakers' social and linguistic backgrounds. There is a large discrepancy between the listeners' perceptions, especially when it comes to migration-related social dialects.
In her study, So-Yeon Ahn investigates how Korean students 11–15 years of age demonstrate language awareness through participation in language play. The study is based on an understanding of the relationship between language play and an ‘engagement with language’ perspective. Ahn discusses how language awareness is displayed in terms of forms, functions, and effects in a series of episodes of language play, as well as how more meaningful interaction is created through collaborative and voluntary engagement.
Suzie Beaulieu and Leif French's paper is concerned with the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' contextually appropriate use of two different stylistic variables. Their study shows that explicit instruction triggered changes in students' productive use of the target features. However, the students' ability to align to L1 stylistic norms was mediated by two factors: task types and linguistic complexity of the stylistic variants. The authors furthermore point out that personal speech-style preferences may also moderate the use of specific stylistic variants.
Pamela Gunning, Joanna White, and Christine Busque examine teacher collaboration between French first language and English second language teachers in an intensive ESL course in Quebec, Canada, focusing on both the teachers' and students' development of awareness of reading strategies over a two-year period. In the first year, the teachers had difficulties establishing collaboration because they lacked common terminology and were unfamiliar with each other's curriculum. The next year, they were given tools to support more collaboration, such as tables showing equivalent terminology for reading strategies. The findings show that consistency of instruction strengthened both learner awareness and autonomous use of reading strategies, and the authors conclude that reading strategies gave a structure for mirroring instruction across languages. However, it is important that teachers have adequate working conditions, such as time, materials, and administrative support.
The topic of Choonkyong Kim's article is L2 learners' challenges with unfamiliar idioms. College ESL learners at intermediate to advanced levels took part in several metalinguistic tasks designed to test their ability to detect new unfamiliar multiword expressions composed of familiar elements. While the students easily noticed single words that were novel to them, they had significantly greater difficulty with identifying idioms made up of words that they already knew. When asked to define expressions of this kind that they had overlooked, they also tended to give less acceptable explanations. The author argues that there is a need to raise students' awareness of the common presence of such idioms in language.
David Lasagabaster and Aintzane Doiz explore 221 Basque students' foreign language proficiency in a longitudinal study. Through a questionnaire, the authors analysed students' perceptions of the importance of grammar and language skills, their preferences for instructional activities, and their self-perceived language improvement. The findings show that, in the early grades, the students put great importance on every language aspect and that they prefer participation in class and group work, but their enthusiasm declines over the years. Their perception of improvement in English is greater in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classes than in regular English as a foreign language classes.
Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix investigates how French students in a German course get a better understanding of the semantic complexity of verb particles through the use of so-called kibbitzing methodology, which is corpus-informed metatalk between a student and a teacher. She examines how the students communicate with their teacher, and her analyses show that the meta-talk activities and the teacher's interventions help the students to talk in a more scientific way about language features and gain a deeper insight into how content and form are interconnected.
In the final article by Şebnem Yalçın, Sevdeğer Çeçen, and Gülcan Erçetin, the authors investigate the determinants of language aptitude, focusing on working memory capacity. Both language aptitude and working memory were measured among the Turkish university students participating in the study, all with an advanced English proficiency. The results show that working memory capacity is crucial in the renewed aptitude construct, but these two cognitive abilities are not interchangeable.
The collection of papers included in this special issue represents just a few of the many fine conference presentations at Language Awareness 2014. We look forward to the next Language Awareness conference in Vienna, Austria, July 19⎼22, 2016, with the promising conference theme: ‘Languages for Life: Educational, Professional and Social Contexts’.