Consciousness And The Acquisition Of Language

The tools, concepts, and vocabulary of phenomenology are used in this book to explore language in a multitude of contexts.

This book explores the place of consciousness in second language learning. It offers extensive background information on theories of consciousness and provides a detailed consideration of both the nature of consciousness and the cognitive context in which it appears. It presents the established Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) framework and explains the place of consciousness within this framework to enable a cognitively conceptualised understanding of consciousness in second language learning. It then applies this framework to fundamental concerns of second language acquisition, those of perception and memory, looking at how second language representations come to exist in the mind and what happens to these representations once they have been established (memory consolidation and restructuring).

The papers included in the volume look at how language awareness affects the outcomes of foreign and second language acquisition in advanced learners. The book focuses on questions such as how much linguistic knowledge is open to the learner’s conscious experience, what should and should not be considered the knowledge of language, how language awareness can be enhanced in the classroom, and, most crucially, what effects language awareness has on attained proficiency. Some papers in the volume also address methodological challenges of researching language awareness, such as the difficulty of defining and measuring awareness with sufficient precision.

The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of conscious and unconscious mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)

Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences.

Publisher Description

Metalinguistic Awareness and Second Language Acquisition is the first book to present an in-depth overview of metalinguistic awareness as it relates to SLA. In this volume, Roehr-Brackin discusses metalinguistic awareness in the context of both child and adult language learning, and outlines the various methods that can be used to measure metalinguistic awareness. The author presents different approaches to metalinguistic awareness, including a cognitive-developmental perspective that explains how the concept relates to literacy, and an applied linguistics perspective that understands metalinguistic awareness as explicit or conscious knowledge about language. Roehr-Brackin explores the role of metalinguistic awareness in language education aimed at young learners, as well as in instructed adult SLA. This book is an excellent resource for those researching or taking courses in second language acquisition, bi- and multilingualism, and language teaching.