Michael Sharwood Smith uconsciousness-raising" meets uLanguage Awareness" Abstract. The paper asks how far common ground can be established between a general educational goal of Language Awareness, and the specific issue of the role of explicit awareness of grarnrnatical structure inside Second Language Acquisition. While there is a common domain of application the language classroom that applies to both concepts of Awareness, it is not easy to link the two. In exploring differences between them, the paper traces some of the major relevant concepts in Second Language Acquisition studies, including "consciousness-raising" and "input-enhancement". On balance, the role of explicit awareness in language acquisition is likely to be strictly limited: regarding general Language Awareness in education and everyday life, however, it would seem that the more we have of this, the better. 1. lntroduction The Language Awareness movement aims to foster, in various sections of society, a sensitivity to the nature of language and its importance in everyday life. lt is not possible to say, in one breath, exactly who is being made aware of language, what aspect(s) of language are being referred to, and who is supposed tobe initiating the activity. Language awareness appears to involve many different combinations. For example, it can mean raising school teachers' and school children's awareness of the mother tongue as an educational goal, or it might mean making the public and appropriate official institutions aware of the language problems that exist in a multicultural society. lt might also mean raising people's awareness of the precise role of language in literature. Within a somewhat different academic environment, the debate about the role of "consciousness" or "conscious awareness" in language learning has been going on since the mid-seventies. lt has long been a matter of debate as to whether "knowing a rule" in a conscious explicit sense will have any immediate or eventual impact upon the learner's spontaneous performance in a new language. Does talking about "how to form the subjunctive" or asking "how many conditionals are there in English? " or "where does the verb go in a subordinate clause in German? " really help develop the behaviour we are trying to foster in the learner? One argument is that the knowledge, or at least the grammatical knowledge, that underpins language skills, is really a largely intuitive affair. This would mean that knowing how the past perfect is formed or used will be as much use to one's intuitive grasp of the grammatical system, as knowing how balance mechanisms operate will help one ride a bike. Explicit knowledge of the tense system is simply interesting technical knowledge about the languge and nothing more. This controversy has filtered through to the world of language teaching methodology once again from the field FLuL 26 (1997) "Consciousness-raising" meets "Language Awareness" 25 known as Second Language Acquisition. This is a field that, in the seventies, really began to assume a separate identity from the more practically-oriented areas of Applied Linguistics and foreign language methodology. Not all of the work done in Second Language Acquisition is of equal interest to teaching practioners, but the role of consciousness is certainly of central relevance, since many teachers still try to explain facts about the language to their students in the hope that it will affect their language development positively. In a paper written in 1979 (see Sharwood Smith 1981) an attempt was made to review the then current debate on consciousness which had been dominated by the polemic of the "creative construction" school, and in particular by Stephen Krashen (Krashen 1981). The bottom-line of my argument then was that the role of consciousness (explict awareness of grammatical structure) could not be assumed tobe trivial, until research bad looked much more intensively into what seemed to me to be a highly complex phenomenon. Recall that Krashen and his associates had declared that conscious learning of structure was of little or no importance for second language development. This particular debate about the facilitation of language learning leaves entirely open the question of whether an awareness of language might be useful for other purposes, of course. lt may then be concluded that, on the face of it, consciousness-raising as discussed within second language learning, and language awareness as discussed in the broader area of applied linguistics are not at all the same thing. At the same time, there is also an area where the two (Consciousness-Raising and Language Awareness) overlap. This is the arena of the language teaching classroom. I think, therefore, that there are some worthwhile general observations to be made about the growing interest in consciousness and awareness in matters to do with language teaching and language learning. 2. Language Awareness In 1992, a new journal was started called Language Awareness. In it, the editors talk about the concept of Language Awareness and its definition. Somewhat forbiddingly for those interested in a crisp definition, they state that it "has the great advantage of being a cover term for anything to do with language". They add that it is a "great term for a grass-roots movement with a shared gut feeling that gradually clarifies itself as more and more attention is paid to it". Then, fortunately for the definition-hunter, they become a little more specific. They talk about "finding things out about language, becoming conscious about one's own and other's use of it in speech and in its written forms, developing a sensitive relationship to it, being able to talk explicitly about one's insights into it". The term "language awareness", then, has many uses with a very general meaning as the common denominator, namely "awareness of what language is" or "awareness of language as an important phenomenon in our lives". Anyone writing FLuL 26 (1997) 26 Michael Sharwood Smith more specifically has to focus on a particular choice amongst a myriad of definitional options. As suggested in my Introdction above, these options have to do with: (a) which people are supposed to become aware (teachers, leamers, govemment officials, the media, the general public), (b) which out of the many aspects of language that may be distinguished they are supposed to become aware of (accent, grammar, communicative function, language loyalty, etc.,), and (c) which people, or other agencies, are to be responsible for bringing about the awareness. What would be most relevant for a comparison with the notion of Consciousness- Raising as it was introduced into the Second Language Acquisition literature is the use that relates to the foreign language teaching classroom. This particular area is, indeed, mentioned by the editors of the joumal Language Awareness: "To the foreign language teacher, it is an essential intellectual framework which has to be in place before effective teaching and leaming can begin [...] it has many facets". The only way, it seems to me, that one can make sense of this extremely general formulation of the term "language awareness" is by trying to understand why one might not be aware of language. lt seems to me that there are several possibilities. One has to do with taking language too much for granted. Another has to do with dogma. Consider the first. While it is impossible for a linguist of any kind to take the phenomenon of language for granted, for the lay person, language is often not the most striking fact of life. The same might be said of air. lt took me some years before I could really conceptualise air as "something" as a gas. To me it was just "nothingness". Of course, everyone is aware of language to some degree. We all search for the "right word" on occasion, and we all feel uncomfortable if we find ourselves "tongue-tied" in embarrassing situations. In particular, we become very aware of language when trying to communicate abroad. However, such awareness is still fairly low-level, it operates in fact at the base level of language literacy. That more is maybe required is reflected in clumsily-worded signs in shops, confusing instructional leaflets, and absurd translations into foreign languages. Such phenomena indictate that even large business companies and govemment institutions are not sufficiently aware of the enormous influence language has on our everyday lives, and equally unaware of the conscious attention it deserves. Perhaps, then, the nature and role of language, as vital as it is to everyone, is not generally appreciated. In other words, it is quite normal to be linguistically naive. lt is therefore important, in a civilised community, that citizens should become more aware, more sensitised to the nature of language as part of their general education. Even in a country like the Netherlands where people grow up weil aware that is it important to know more than one language, it may be that too little time is taken making this awareness amongst the populace at large more precise. FLuL 26 (1997) "Consciousness-raising" meets "Language Awareness" 27 lt may be that the language awareness that results from the recognition of a need is still very limited. lf language awareness is then a movement that aims to make as many people as possible sensitive to the influence of language on our lives, it seems to be a highly laudable activity. The need for precision and elaboration leads on to the second possibility in the elucidation of what the Language Awareness movement really is. This explanation would be more of a sociological one. That is to say, Language Awareness might simply be one manifestation of a general trend in society in general perhaps a new dogma. Trends often exhibit the well-known pendulum swing from one basic attitude to a contrary one. Focussing on the nature of language, on the forms it takes and the functions it fulfils, has, in the past, been associated with an older, more formalistic style of education. In language teaching terms, this means, in the Netherlands, for example, the style associated with the era of Poutsma, Kruisinga or Zandvoort. Further afield, one could name great figures such as Otto Jespersen and Henry Sweet, one alleged model for Shaw's Professor Higgins. The preoccupation with traditional grammar the grammar-translation dogma has given way in many places to a less formalistic attitude, and ultimately to an approach which plays down any explicit, analytic focus on either form or function (the "natural leaming" dogma. The educational trend since the sixties has been in the direction of intuitive, expressive, communicative modes of behaviour, and away from formalistic attitudes. In such circumstances, an explicit, analytic approach to language tends to lose favour. However, the abandonment of the analytic approach, given this deeper concern with communication and expression, is not a logical necessity. Conscious awareness and analysis is, though, irrationally associated with the bad old days when the focus was solely on form and structure. But now, with the Language Awareness movement, the pendulum appears to be swinging back in the direction of a greater focus on the forms and functions of language, albeit using the insights and frameworks provided by modern linguistics rather than the traditional grammarians. Perhaps this trend is also reflected in the general cry for a retum of traditional approaches to education in general. lt is, at the moment, a swing back only in a limited sense. Some salient aspects of the old days, the prescriptivism, is not (yet) manifest in the modern trend. lt is as though people have decided that you can talk about language and analyse it without going back to the old models without focusing exclusively on grammar and without giving people a lot of rules and regulations that may be quite at variance with current native speaker usage. Language awareness, may, then, be part of the pendulum swing in an area somewhere between the rigid formalism of Dickens's Mr Gradgrind and a view of education where intuition and creativity are valued above all else. The general search for the "best" way to teach languages is always going to be beset by dogma until more facts about what really goes on in leamer's heads come to light, so the question now is: what are the implications of increased language awareness for the the language leamer? How does this idea of language awareness FLuL 26 (1997) 28 Michael Sharwood Smith link up with second Language Acquisition, a field which purports to investigate, amongst other things, the intemal psychological processes that drive second language development? In particular, how does Language Awareness link up with the investigation of the role of consciousness in second language learning? 3. Consciousness-raising in second language acquisition lt seems to me that Second Language Acquisition, in the way it has developed since the sixties, is broadly speaking a branch of psychology rather than a branch of sociology. That is to say it plays a small but important part in the general drive to describe and explain the complexites of the human mind. lt is not centrally the study of the second language user as a social animal. This does not mean that social or sociological ideas are not appealed to. Rather, they are recruited in the general attempt to rigorously describe and explain how learners develop various aspects of language ability in a new language. In other words, we are trying to explain what goes on inside learners, that is, inside their heads (or 'minds'), and not simply language behaviour outside in the classroom, or in the community at large. What is outside is important in that it provides the crucial setting for psychological development to take place. While the environment does not itself dictate what goes on in the head of the learner, it does make available (or not, as the case be) the crucial nourishment for the plant to grow. The "plant" has to acquire, of course, not only the grammatical system, but the phonological, pragmatic and lexical aspects of language as well. The social setting can be described by the sociologist (or sociolinguist, specifically), but it is the nature of the learner's intemal systems that, to continue the metaphor, dicates what part of that setting is taken in as "nourishment". To what extent, then, inside this view, does the language learner profit from Language Awareness from a special type of Language Awareness that is directed towards oneself, towards one's own linguistic development? lt is true that there was a move in the seventies, as mentioned above, to downplay the role of conscious analysis in second language acquisition. This served to reinforce or give credence to language teachers who wished to move away from grammar rules and explanations to a more "natural method" (see Krashen and Terrell 1983). The prime proponent of this approach was Krashen (see for example Dulay, Burt & Krashen 1982). The crux of this approach is that teachers' explanations of grammar, or anything to do with language form or function, contribute to the language leamer's technical knowledge, just as the theoretical component of driving lessons affects the learner driver's theoretical konwledge. This technical linguistic knowledge plays, according to this dogma, as minimal a role in the actual development of language skill as driving school theory contributes to the learner driver's ability to comer, brake in wet weather, and drive a car effortlessly through a busy High Street. Language Awareness in language learning would then, on this view, maybe have a general FLuL 26 (l 997) "Consciousness-raising" meets "Language Awareness" 29 educational value as technical knowledge, but it would have little or no value as regards the facilitation of the leamer's progress towards a more native-like ability in the target language. To call Krashen's Monitor Model, as it used to be referred to, mere dogma is more than a little unfair, since it was based on a certain amount of empirical research. This involved a set of studies which looked at error frequencies in spontaneous leamer performance. The results were suggestive of a so-called unchangeable natural order of acquisition for a few aspects of morphosyntax, holding for all leamers regardless of their native language. These results, however, did not yield a sufficently solid basis for any wide-ranging claims for language teachers. They were, however, used as a basis for educational dogma, and, if the truth be told, its proponents in Second Language Acquisition were not modest enough to point out the limitations of their scientific foundation. This overestimation of the practical and theoretical significance of that research caused much irritation within Second Language Acquisition circles. The argument that I, for example, put forward (in Sharwood Smith 1981) was not a denial in principle of the clear distinction between the conscious, analytic, technical knowledge of the language system, and the intuitive knowledge of language that drives spontaneous language performance. Nor was it a denial of the possibility that technical knowledge had no impact on the nature and sequencing of intuitive language acquisition. lt was written to point out: 1. the limitations of the research findings, upon which the theory was at that time based, 2. Tue vague use of the term "consciousness" in their arguments. In the present context only the second problem is of real relevance, since "consciousness" is often associated with "awareness", and awareness is a concept that figures both in Language Awareness andin Consciousness-Raising. For someone who remembers the debates in Second Language Acquisition about Consciousness and how the concept was downgraded as being theoretically uninteresting, it is especially interesting to note the resurgence of consciousness as a theoreticallychallenging phenomenon in several different disciplines, all of which fall under the general rubric of cognitive science. One has only to look at the popular science section of respectable bookshops to find evidence of this. In fact, so intensively has consciousness been discussed by linguists, physicists, chemists, neuroscientists, philosophers and the like of late, that it is very difficult to get away with anything which is not highly tentative about the nature of the phenomenon (see Jackendoff 1988, Dennett 1991, Flanagan 1992). At the same time, if there is one common trend in current interdisciplinary discussion on consciousness, it seems to be consistent with at least one of Krashen's claims (however strongly or weakly supported), namely that cognitive processes of which we are conscious hardly ever dictate, directly, the way in which we solve problems, be they linguistic problems or problems of other kinds. This is an interesting finding, because intelligent and FLuL 26 (1997) 30 Michael Sharwood Smith well-read people many readers of this article included will have a strong (and now allegedly illusory) gut feeling that conscious thought does have this power. Two simple examples may suffice to show how limited our concious experience in fact is. If you are asked to divide one hundred by thirteen, what do you do? lt would seem that this is a conscious problem-solving task par excellence. People might of course do it in different ways. You might, for example, visualise the sum as it would be written on paper, and attempt to simulate the written calculation in your mind's eye. But further introspection will show you that the actual calculations you perform are not available to your conscious mind. You present each problem silently to yourself for example, "10 times 13? ", and the answer "130", simply pops up in the same way as it would appear on the screen of a packet calculator. You cannot consciously investigate the calculatory process itself. More dramatic still is the way you talked to yourself while attempting this task without having the slightest clue about the rapid way the words and structures were computed in your head. Cognitive scientists like Dennett have been at pains to point out that the notion of consciousness as a "theatre" where all the inner working of your mind are presented is simply an illusion. We should therefore by wary of granting consciousness too great a role in language leaming, even when we refuse. to dismiss it completely on. grounds of dogma. 4. Input-enhancement In Sharwood Srnith (1993), it was argued that the term "consciousness-raising" was over-ambitious and too imprecise. One problem is that it begs the question of whether leamers actually are always "conscious" of what a teacher or textbook is trying to do. In my 1981 article, attention bad already been drawn to more subtle ways in which leamers may be made aware of some linguistic form. The aim then was to get away from the idea that only explicit explanations engaged the leamer's awareness. Leamers may be induced to notice an inflexion or the position of a particular part of speech or indeed the nature of a particular sound without the teacher explicitly drawing their attention to these things. At the same time, in the light of the need to do more research, it seemed premature to talk about what happens inside the leamer's head. One should rather talk about the ways in which one hopes to engage the leamer's attentional mechanisms and perhaps their conscious analytic introspection. The term used to suggest this was "input enhancement". For example, by using exaggerated intonation, gestures, visual graphic techniques, one might manipulate the input in controlled ways, in order to test whether it had any effect on leaming. Only when we have isolated a steady relationship between some enhancement technique and leamer behaviour can we begin to talk about what has been "raised". Then again, we need a much more refined theory of attention and consciousness before we can incorporate the findings, at a later stage, into a theory of language acquisition. FLuL 26 (1997) "Consciousness-raising" meets "Language Awareness" 31 5. Conclusion lt is, in sum, possible to view Consciousness-Raising or Input Enhancement as relating to the Language Awareness movement. However, the gulf between Language Awareness as an umbrella term, covering a whole range of issues, and the very specific types of psychological phenomena discussed under the term Consciousness-Raising is enormous. The latter term itself, as I have just suggested, and as it is used in Second Language Acquisition, has turned out to be far too general a concept for precise use in what we like to regard as an field where scientific rigor is an absolute necessity. How in the course of their development language learners become aware of the outer form, the formal properties of language, and how this affects their language growth is a far cry from, for instance, the need to educate the general public, and make them more sensitive to language issues, maybe thereby affecting their attitudes to their fellow-citizens, and to people from other countries and other language communities. So knowledge of grammar in terms of Consciousness-Raising and knowledge of grammar in terms of Language Awareness are not the same thing. The best way of distinguishing between them that I am aware of has been formulated by Carl James (personal communication). Rephrasing a little, we may say that Language Awareness is about raising awareness of grammar already possessed, and Consciousness-Raising is about raising awareness of grammar yet to be acquired. A different message needs to be attached to each, however. Extending awareness of grammar, and of language in general, within the population at large can only be a good thing the more the merrier, as the saying goes. But this is not true of consciousness-raising in Second Language Acquisition. In fact, if anything useful is to be learned from the Second Language Acquisition literature about Consciousness-Raising, it may still turn out tobe about the limits to be set on the way or ways that explicit awareness of structure affects individual success or failure, especially where grammar is concerned. References DULAY, Heidi/ BURT, Marina/ KRASHEN, Stephen D. (1982): Language Two. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DENNETT, Daniel C. (1991): Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown. FLANIGAN, 0. (1992): Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. JACKENDOFF, Ray (1987): Consciousness and the Computational Mind. New York: Academic Press . .KRASHEN, Stephen D. (1982): Principles and Practice in Second Language Leaming and Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. .KRASHEN, Stephen D. / TERRELL, Tracy D. (1983): The Natural Method, Hayward, Ca.: Alemany Press. FLuL 26 (1997) 32 Michael Sharwood Smith SHARWOOD SMITH, Michael ( 1981 ): "Consciousness-raising and the second language learner". In: Applied Linguistics 2, 159-168. SHARWOOD SMITH, Michael (1993): "Input enhancement in instructed second language acquisition: theoretical bases". In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15, 165-180. SHARWOOD SMITH, Michael (1994): Language Leaming: Theoretical Foundations. London: Longman. FLuL 26 (1997)