Claudia Finkbeiner – författare

This collection argues that being aware of and reflecting on language form and language use is a powerful tool, not only in language learning, but also in wider society. It adopts an interdisciplinary stance: one chapter argues the need for Language Awareness in business contexts, while another examines the role of critical cultural awareness and Language Awareness in education as ‘bildung’. Others report on research studies in language classrooms and in teacher education. Language Awareness is interrogated from a range of perspectives such as peer interaction, teaching young learners, learner strategies and strategies for writing, online reading, and oral fluency training. The scope is global, including contributions from Canada, Germany, Iran, Japan, Spain, and the UK, and covers bilingual as well as multilingual contexts. The book will be of interest to language teachers, language teacher educators, other language professionals, and generally to the language aware.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Language Awareness.

This collection argues that being aware of and reflecting on language form and language use is a powerful tool, not only in language learning, but also in wider society. It adopts an interdisciplinary stance: one chapter argues the need for Language Awareness in business contexts, while another examines the role of critical cultural awareness and Language Awareness in education as ‘bildung’. Others report on research studies in language classrooms and in teacher education. Language Awareness is interrogated from a range of perspectives such as peer interaction, teaching young learners, learner strategies and strategies for writing, online reading, and oral fluency training. The scope is global, including contributions from Canada, Germany, Iran, Japan, Spain, and the UK, and covers bilingual as well as multilingual contexts. The book will be of interest to language teachers, language teacher educators, other language professionals, and generally to the language aware.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Language Awareness.

This book is a valuable resource for teachers and other professionals who are looking for a proven way to increase cultural appreciation and awareness. New applications of the ABCs model of Cultural Understanding and Communication are presented and discussed in this new volume, based on studies done in the United States, and Canada and Europe. In this ground-breaking project, the authors describe how the ABCs model complicated and challenged and changed the cultural perceptions of those who participated in it, even those who were initially highly resistant to such possibilities. At the heart of the project is the exchange of narratives – life stories that give insight into the cultural worlds of selves and others. In addition to the narratives, other instruments including the Transcultural Competence Scale (TCC), provide further evidence of the positive impact of the ABCs on participants'' receptivity toward cultural differences.

In the TRANSABCs project, researchers from both sides of the Atlantic invited teacher candidates, students who will become workplace and other professionals to write an autobiography (A) of themselves from various cultural perspectives, a biography (B) of an individual who is culturally different from themselves along particular dimensions, and to use these documents to conduct cross-cultural comparisons (C) between themselves and the person they interviewed. Furthermore, candidates developed culturally responsive ideas for the school or the workplace (C). These exchanges and analyses produced epiphanies and insights that translated into specific actions to improve cultural understanding and communication in classrooms and workplaces. Educators and professionals can take from these examples to inspire their own personal journey toward greater cultural understanding and sensitivity.