Conference
LLRC conference: Language Awareness in the language classroom
- Date
- Thursday 12 June 2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47, 2.27, 0.03
Language Awareness is explicit knowledge and conscious perception about language and language learning. It is seen as an important aspect of successful language use and language learning. As a much broader concept than traditional explicit knowledge about morphosyntax, it encompasses recognizing the rules, structures, and functions of language from sounds to discourse and pragmatic use. It also includes understanding language learning processes, multilingual language use, and strategies in language use.
Teachers have always included teaching of language awareness in the language classroom. Especially in higher education, language and culture studies usually explicitly include aspects of language awareness in the “language” part of the program. At the same time, language awareness may not always be an integral part of teaching the communicative skills within the higher education curriculum. Moreover, in secondary education, the broad notion of language awareness is rarely part of the language curriculum, and is usually not included in the learning goals. However, the new curriculum in secondary education in The Netherlands will include language awareness as an explicit learning goal, besides the learning goals of cultural awareness and communicative skills. This new explicit learning goal will hold for both the foreign languages and for Dutch, the school language. Adding this (new) learning goal of language awareness raises questions for teachers and researchers. For instance, teachers and researchers may ask: What aspects of language awareness do we need to teach? How do we integrate the new content on language with learning communicative skills? How do we use language awareness for use of language translation and language generation tools?
Call for abstracts
On June 12th, 2025, the LLRC will organize a one-day conference on precisely this topic. We are very happy to announce that Dr. Agneta Svalberg (University of Leicester) has agreed to give the keynote lecture (see title and abstract below). She is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and as Committee member of the Association for Language Awareness has a long track record in research on language awareness.
We invite language teachers and researchers to send in an abstract for the conference. We welcome abstracts for a variety of presentation types: research presentations, good practice presentations, or workshops, as long as they fit the conference theme.
Deadline for abstract submission: February 15th, 2025.
Keynote by Agneta Svalberg (Leicester University): Language Awareness for a Changing World
We are living in an age of rapid change, including increasingly multilingual and multicultural classrooms and developments in online technology. The language environment, e.g. the languages learners already know or are exposed to and the ones they might need or want to learn, has changed. At the same time, translation is only a click away, and languages can more easily than ever be learnt 'in the wild' (i.e. outside the classroom). In this talk I will discuss some of the implications for language teaching. I will suggest that the Language Apprenticeship (Hawkins 1999, 2005) approach, and the Language Awareness it generates, is a way forward. Terms will be explained, and practical examples discussed.