Sociocultural perspectives on teacher language awareness in form-focused EFL classroom instruction

Abstract

A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to have a significant impact on grammar or form-focused (FonF) instruction. TLA has traditionally been assumed to be a cognitive construct. A more recent view on TLA argues for its sociocultural significance in second language learning. This paper builds on this recent view and attempts to illuminate the need to incorporate sociocultural perspectives on TLA in FonF instruction. Through a micro-analysis of four naturally occurring FonF instructional episodes from a Hong Kong EFL classroom, we identify problems with the teacher's form-focused instructional discourse and discuss how these problems may have revealed the teacher's lack of awareness of the sociocultural nature of form-meaning connections, the role of learners' previous embodied experiences as meaning-makers, and of the need to establish intersubjective understanding with the learners about the multiple texts and contexts that the learners might be drawing on in the meaning-making process. Implications will be drawn with a view to facilitating EFL teachers' form-focused instructional discourse. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.