A Study On Teacher Language Awareness:English Teachers' Awareness Of Learners' Language Difficulties

Teacher Language Awareness(TLA)is a professional attribute for language teachers and the possession of a higher level of TLA is regarded as a necessary attribute of any competent L2 teachers.Teacher's awareness of learners,being an important part of TLA,is most obviously relevant to student learning.Given that there are relatively fewer studies on language teachers' awareness of learners in mainland China,the present study attempted to continue that focus.The study mainly focused on the current level of English teachers' awareness of learners' language difficulties,and set out to investigate their ability to make correct judgments on students' language difficulties and to identify reasons for these difficulties,and their awareness of dealing with these difficulties in teaching practice,in order to show a general indication on their language awareness.On the basis of Andrews' s Model of Teacher Language Awareness(2007)and Mc Neill's Model of Language Awareness for L2 teachers(2005),the investigation was conducted.And the research design attempted to be in conformity with a complete teaching process including lesson preparation and classroom teaching,in order to conduct a deeper exploration into English teachers' awareness of learners' language difficulties involving in the declarative and procedural dimension.Therefore,a mixed use of quantitative and qualitative approach underpinned the study.And an error correction task,a lesson plan task and a microteaching task were employed to elicit relevant data.50 first-year postgraduates from Northwest Normal University took part in the investigation.Among them,there were 17 subjects who have become in-service teachers and had at least three-year English language teaching experiences before they continued to receive postgraduate education,but the other 33 subjects,being pre-service teachers,who had no professional English language teaching experience.The results of the present study were enumerated as follows: 1)English teachers were able to correctly predict students' language difficulties,and pre-service English teachers tended to make more accurate judgments on students' language difficulties than in-service English teachers.2)English teachers mentioned factors such as grammar features themselves(complexity of use,salience and input frequency),pedagogical arrangement(instructional focus),learners' language learning environment,learners themselves and first language transfer to account for learners' language difficulties,which showed that they were indeed able to correctly predict learners' language difficulties.3)Making correct judgments on students' language difficulties did not mean that a teacher had the ability or awareness to cope with these difficulties.English teachers were aware of the setting of difficultpoints,but paid less attention to the engagement with students' language difficulties in the instructional design.Accordingly,only a small number of teachers attempted to adopt some common pedagogical strategies(e.g.a teacher-fronted explicit explanation,a generalized approach,extensive controlled practices,giving priorities and allocating more time to students' language difficulties,use of visual support and exemplification)to deal with language difficulties in teaching practice.Therefore,it could be observed that English teachers'(including pre-service and in-service teachers)awareness of learners' language difficulties and their language awareness were still in a lower place.But it cannot be denied that in-service English teachers were more capable of organizing smooth teaching procedures and employing diverse pedagogical strategies to deal with students' language difficulties than pre-service English teachers.So the result also revealed that teaching experience was not a decisive factor affecting English teachers' awareness of learners' language difficulties,but it just exerted a partial effect on teachers' awareness of learners.