Peter Garrett & Cots, Josep M. Cots (eds.) (2018) : The Routledge Handbook of Language Awareness [book review]

Abstract

Language Awareness is an important topic in language education, and in recent years it has gained even more ground after the area of applied language study recognised that the Chomskyan (monolingual) notion of native-speaker-hearer is largely a myth. In second/foreign language education (SLA) in past decades the native speaker was set as the model for the learner. Teachers were preferably native speakers of the language they taught, and their learners were expected to aim toward native speaker competence. Now, it is common knowledge that the vast majority of language learners are plurilingual and multicultural even before they join the SLA class, and therefore they come already equipped with a certain level of language and metalinguistic awareness. In this context there can be no doubt that this book edited by Garrett and Cots is auspicious. The Routledge Handbook of Language Awareness (2018) consists of three parts, covered in 510 pages. The first part focusses on ‘Language Teaching and Teachers’; the second part is about ‘Language Learning and Learners’; and the third part goes ‘Beyond Language Pedagogy’. There are a total of thirty chapters, which on the whole, give a good overview of the field, bringing together theory and research and making it easily accessible in one book.