Language Awareness

In the reading “Critical Multilingual Language Awareness and Teacher Education”, Garcia focuses on getting teachers to question and rethink the concept of language and to recognize linguistic diversity in young children. If teachers begin to have a better understanding of their students and how their students learn, they will have a higher success rate in the classroom. Knowledge of and about language will help to initiate learning opportunities for students and will increase classroom interaction. A classroom environment has a lot of diversion and being unconscious toward the different lifestyles and backgrounds does not give the best teaching environment for our learners. Two goals of teacher education are being sensitive to language and giving activities in authentic language data. 

 Creating language awareness promotes learners to challenge linguistic prejudices.  An observation I have had while living in Canada is that English speakers have been the majority group in my childhood schools and every other language was looked upon as the minority. If teachers do not include a variety of languages and acknowledge the discrimination that was pushed onto certain racial groups in our history, marginalization becomes supported. Something that stood out to me was the lack of Indigenous history that was taught in my elementary school. Their territories were not acknowledged before beginning class and the history of residential schools was not taught. 

My language awareness significantly changed once I began to work at Luther College High School in Regina as a residence assistant. Growing up, I never had to worry about not understanding my teacher or having difficulties adjusting to schools. Luther College High School has a majority of international students living in the dorms, which has been an eye opening experience for me. I began to acknowledge how much effort and motivation the students need while learning a new language. Luckily, Luther has great ESL classes for new learners to help them adjust better to learning English. Luther is a very diverse school, and acknowledging that there are students from all around the world and being aware of their different racial backgrounds is very necessary and important for teachers and students. 

Movies, social media, and advertisements  have a strong control over stereotypes of racial groups. Looking at movies for example, the majority of the time, the “bad guy” is shown in a different language other than English. An example of this is in Disney’s movie called Robin Hood, where the evil king has a British accent. This gives the idea that people with accents are less trustworthy and less kind as non-RP accents.

Including language awareness in your teachings not only creates students to understand the difference between cultures, but it prepares the students for life beyond school. Knowledge of other languages encourages new ways of thinking. Language awareness makes travelling easier and allows you to form connections with others that have a different lifestyle. Having an understanding of the learner’s language profile will help you shape a better relationship with the student and will help with lesson plannings. Every student will have different aims and goals, and with the teacher’s guidance and support, the learners can build on their current level of understanding and gain confidence in using new knowledge or skills.