3.2 What is language awareness?

I think language awareness is very important for a teacher. You want your pupils to fully understand every aspect of a language in order to learn it. This means you need to fully understand every aspect first, before you can teach them. It is far more than just knowing the spelling and grammar of a language. As a teacher you need to be able to understand where a language comes from, how it evolved and why it is the way it is (present & future). If you want your pupils to master a language, you need to be able to educate them on every aspect of that language. This also includes being aware of the problems that can occur in the language-using process. If you are aware of these problems, you can avoid your pupils making these mistakes and learning the wrong things. This also makes sure you can answer future questions about these problems. We call this focal awareness. You can reach higher levels of understandings and use and you can detect mistakes made by your pupils. When pupils have a higher language awareness, they will be able to reflect on their own language use. This means they become more independent.