ABSTRACT
The concept of language awareness is fundamentally concerned with language education in both L1 and L2, and the language awareness movement thus has all educational aims rather than a research-oriented agenda. According to the introduction in C. James and P. Garrett’s frequently cited volume on the topic of language awareness which can be achieved through programmes of study about language. The concepts of metalinguistic awareness and language awareness overlap in part, but the notion of language awareness is somewhat broader in outlook and therefore arguably less clear-cut. The researchers set out to trial a form-focused approach aimed at improving children’s oral and written language development via prior enhancement of their metalinguistic awareness. In order to measure learners’ knowledge of question formation, the researchers employed a written grammaticality judgement task, a scrambled-questions task carried out in pairs, and oral interviews with half of the sample to explore their metalinguistic awareness of the targeted structure.
