The paper is in four parts. It first traces the history of the 'British' Language Awareness (LA) movement, from its grassroots origins, through its confrontation with the establishment, to its eventual academicisation. There follows an extended definition of LA, wherein LA is compared to congeners like Linguistic Awareness, Knowledge about Language and Metalinguistic Awareness. The third move involves a comparison of LA with the complementary and parallel enterprise of Consciousness Raising. Finally, and most substantially, recent developments in the fields of bilingualism and 'new' Contrastive Linguistics are cited in order to define the cross-linguistic dimension of LA: a major concern for the founding fathers of LA, who searched hard for ways to bridge the gap between mother tongue and foreign language education.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Carl James (1999) studied this question.