Acceso usuarios
M.L. Wales
This paper describes some teaching and learning which took place in the English on the Job Project, a long‐term English as a Second Language (ESL) programme for immigrant employees in the Victorian Transport Authorities, which was researched and implemented during the 1980s. Based on data collected in several research projects related to The English on the Job Project, including some taped and transcribed in‐depth interviews with the ESL instructors involved, the paper describes courses for three different learner groups, in which learners’ Language Awareness was intentionally exploited or developed with the purpose of increasing their second‐language proficiency. The learners were immigrant workers of non‐English‐speaking background, who had been in Australia for between 15 and 30 years, and spoke fossilised interlanguages which varied in their phonological and morphosyntactic proximity to native‐speaker Australian English. Aspects of Language Awareness involved varied in relation to the different levels of ESL proficiency in the three learner groups. They include awareness of: previously misperceived formal aspects of the second language (L2): mismatches between learners’ and native‐speakers’ oral productions of the target language; categories for previously stored but unanalysed linguistic information; language use in the first and second languages. Changes observed in learners’ L2 performance (noted either in the classroom or at work) suggest that the aspects of Language Awareness invoked in these courses had a significant positive effect upon the learners’ L2 development.
