ABSTRACT
As pupil learning is the ultimate goal of all FL teaching, the question of pupil knowledge is often taken for granted in theories of FL pedagogy. Affecting how and what pupils think about languages and language learning is in many ways the central purpose of language teaching, underlying almost all aspects of FL education, yet reflection on the issue separately and as an in-depth object of study in its own right has been largely overlooked by both theorists and classroom practitioners. However, if teacher cognition is rightly recognised as an important element in the process of classroom language education then it seems equally legitimate to argue for a theory of pupil cognition in this learning context. In fact, the argument we are making in this book is that the role of pupil cognition forms part of a threefold interrelationship between teacher knowledge (individual teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and assumptions related to language teaching and learning), curricular knowledge (in its broadest sense, consisting of different interlinking domains such as subject knowledge, corpus knowledge, professional knowledge) and pupil knowledge.
