A Survey On Chinese English Majors' Language Awareness And Its Significance For Foreign Language Teaching

"Language awareness"might be viewed as the generalization of mental quality of language. Starting with an introduction to the origin and development of the concept of language awareness, the thesis tries to find the interrelationship between language awareness and English proficiency by investigating Chinese English majors'language awareness. Based on the empirical study, the thesis is expected to shed some light on Chinese foreign language teaching and learning. The innovations of this thesis may be found in two aspects: first, the concept of language awareness is relatively new and theoretical discussions of it may make a little contribution to relevant studies; second, studies on the correlation between language awareness and English proficiency have been neglected while the present study is hoping to lay the groundwork for a thorough understanding of it and to arouse more and more people's attention to it.This thesis consists of five chapters besides introduction and conclusion. The full text is organized as follows:Chapter 1 is the literature review. In this part, the author makes an introduction to the origin and development of the concept of language awareness. It is pointed out that scholars have long recognized the mental quality of language and they tried to explore it from the perspectives of linguistic sense, linguistic thinking, etc. This chapter gives a retrospective study on linguistic sense, linguistic thinking and language awareness at home and abroad in order to present the achievements and limitations of the previous studies and to propose the questions for the study in this thesis.Chapter 2 expounds the theoretical framework. First, the definition, characteristics of linguistic sense, linguistic thinking, and language awareness are illustrated. And then the interrelationship of those concepts is stated.To investigate Chinese English majors'language awareness and the interrelationship between language awareness and English proficiency, a survey about language awareness in English is made in Chapter 3. A self-designed questionnaire is adopted and the survey is made on the third-year students of the English department from Shandong Normal University.Chapter 4 presents the results and discussions of the survey. Language awareness is found to be significantly correlated with English proficiency and there are significant differences between the high score group and low score group. It is fair to say that language awareness does exist. Reasons can be found in two aspects: first the design of the questionnaire aims to test subjects'language awareness and the reliable resources ensure its validity; second, language awareness test provides results supporting our theoretically proved postulationIn Chapter 5, some implications are touched upon and some suggestions are provided. Since language awareness is significantly correlated with English proficiency, it is necessary to address language awareness into English foreign language classroom. As to strategies for the cultivation of language awareness, noticing and comparisons between mother tongue and foreign language are feasible and effective.Finally comes the conclusion of the whole thesis. It is written in the expectation that it will make a little contribution to the study of language awareness and arouse more and more people's interest in language awareness so as to reveal its true nature and make full use of it in language teaching and learning.Despite the limitations, the present study may provide some valuable information about the current state of Chinese English majors'language awareness. It is of great significance to Chinese foreign language teaching since it aims to study foreign language learning from a brand new perspective. Further studies still need to be undertaken to deepen our understanding of language awareness and perfect foreign language teaching and learning.