Through the first two weeks of ELNG 200 I’ve started to understand more on what the meaning of language awareness is and how to understand it for myself as well as bring it into my future classroom. Before we discussed the deeper meaning of Language Awareness, to me I believed it was knowing if you knew how to speak the language or not. Now I understand it is much more than simply speaking a language. Language awareness is noticing the small and big things in your everyday life such as, that in English we say a sentence one way, but in Spanish it is said backwards, example: Blue shoe in English is, shoe blue, in Spanish. Also, that there are many different “types” of languages in some countries, such as high French, or low French. When discussing language awareness in a zoom group, there was discussion that to be able to understand different languages, I took different classes in high school and university, such as French or Cree and one of my group members simply just asks her coworkers who speak a different language how to say particular words or to teach her words so she can understand more of their language. 

            I’ve come to realize that language awareness is not just being aware of who speaks what language and that there are many different languages. It is also to realize that in different languages words can have different meanings and we need to understand how to use those words or actions when talking to other people. While doing research for our Linguistic Landscape assignment I came to realize how many English-speaking signs are around my small town of Raymore although we are more than just an English-speaking community. A few stores are run by different background but yet have all English in their restaurants or stores. We have an electronic bulletin board at the end of main street that only shows English on it as well. It really made me stop and wonder to how many people are actually language aware of what is not only going around them but also in their community. If they notice the small changes that need to happen or pick up on the small differences in languages. This makes me excited for what is to come in this class and being able to bring more knowledge and understand of language awareness to my future classrooms!