Language Awareness in the Classroom five domains, proposed by James and
Garrett (1991)
Affective, social, power, cognitive and performance domains.
The affective domain deals with the relationship between the learner’s feelings and mental
thinking. From this perspective, the language awareness approach seeks to consider the
learner’s entire person by encouraging him/her to contribute experiences and personal
relevance in the learning process. The affective domain also includes the feeling of knowing
in language learning contexts.
The social domain looks at the consequences of our globalising society where problems
often arise from ethnic diversities, due to cultural and linguistic frictions. A way of tackling
these problems, through a language awareness approach, is to see the cognitive and
cultural benefits of multilingual classrooms.
In the power domain, James and Garrett (1991) look at the language as an instrument of
manipulation and refer as such to the term conscientisation, formulated by the social
engineer Freire (1972). This term, quoted in James & Garrett (1991:14): involves alerting
people to the hidden meanings, tacit assumptions and rhetorical traps laid by those who
traditionally have most access to the media for verbal communication. These may be
governments, bureaucracies, the church, commerce, or, worst of all, unscrupulous
individuals. The power domain of language awareness is habitually called Critical
Language Awareness (CLA), which normally is a term in literature and deals with for
example the reader/writer relationship and interpersonal meanings. However, concerning
language awareness and the abovementioned power domain, CLA underlines for example
that communication performances in learning contexts could include discussions on how
language attitudes and values are formed socially and politically and how minority languages
and their speakers are represented. For example, in the classroom it could involve pupils
discussing what kinds of cultural representations that are presented in the textbooks in order
to see if and why there are any minority cultures that are excluded or majority cultures that
are overrepresented.
The cognitive domain deals with the relation between language and thought where
metalinguistic awareness, reflection and analysis are highlighted. James & Garrett (1991)
also bring up learner’s reflection in his/her own learning process.
The performance domain deals with language in use, communication strategies and the
activity of talking about language with a more or less formal metalanguage. What could be
stated concerning James and Garrett’s (1991) scope of language awareness is that all
domains tend to intermingle with one another.
Moreover, as James and Garrett point out, this division of LA is a way to clarify and to give a
consensus to the meaning of the concept. From a teacher’s perspective these domains
could also serve to facilitate the LA work in the language classroom as the scope covers
many relevant and important aspects of language that could be useful in raising pupils’
awareness.