چکیده:
A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to exert a tremendous influence on language instruction. However, reviewing literature revealed that it has not received due attention in teacher training centers in Iran. Therefore, this paper reports on an investigation into the metalinguistic awareness of prospective teachers at Teacher Education Universities of Iran training to be junior and senior high school English teachers. The study focuses on the test performance of these prospective teachers as an indication of their explicit knowledge base and also the relationship between the metalinguistic knowledge and their error identification capability. To that end, a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT) and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) were administered to 207 student teachers to canvass the nature and extent of their repertoire of explicit knowledge about language and of grammatical terminologies as part of their TLA. The results revealed a moderate level of metalinguistic knowledge and a significant relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and error identification ability. Moreover, the findings of the study shed light on the prominence of metalinguistic knowledge as a means of improving teachers' linguistic proficiency, detected the lacunae in student teachers' knowledge about language and signaled the need for improvement in prospective teachers' metalinguistic knowledge.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Studies carried out in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that learners undertaking teacher education programmes were mostly from a 'post traditional grammar' period and, as a result of this, had a less than confident mastery of knowledge about language and possessed meager language awareness (Chandler, Robinson, & Noyes, 1988; Williamson & Hardman, 1995; Wray, 1993).
In a similar vein, the literature on TLA suggests that not all teachers possess sufficient metalinguistic knowledge to explain grammatical rules or to utilize the efficiency of varied options within form-focused instruction approaches (Andrews, 1999a, 2003; Bolitho, 1988; Ellis, 2008; Mitchell, 2000; Wright, 1991; Wright & Bolitho, 1997).
Consequently, giventhe significance of TLA as an essential component of teacher professionalism (Shulman, 1999) as well as a subcomponent of the second language (L2) teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (Andrews, 2001, 2003), this study explored the Iranian prospective English teachers' metalinguistic awareness and their understandings of explicit knowledge about language.
The metalanguage recognition test which measures the participants' explicit knowledge about language is cognitively less demanding than the rule formulation and metalinguistic production tests in that respondents are not asked to provide any terminology but only to match given terms to examples.
Given the contribution of TLA to effective teaching, teacher education programmes have an important role here to address the existing gaps and redress them so as to prepare qualified language teachers with high levels of metalinguistic knowledge and the pedagogical skills to develop students' linguistic proficiency."