Consciousness raising tasks: Developing learners’ reflective attitude toward plurilingualism

Abstract

Abstract This report proposes a number of tasks which help learners become more aware of how their feelings are moulded in their L1 and notice crosslinguistic similarities and differences between their L1 and a target language. The proposed tasks are motivated by findings in the crosslinguistic influence literature and a study that investigated Japanese learners’ perception of crosslinguistic similarities and differences between English and Japanese passives. Japanese has two types of passives, while English has only one. Although the two types of Japanese passives share some properties, they have distinctive functions; one type is mainly used to express adversative feelings of the speaker towards the event a sentence describes, while the other is much the same as the English passive. The study results indicate that half of the subjects perceive crosslinguistic similarities yet avoid using the construction and the other half incorrectly assume similarities which do not exist in reality. The proposed tasks attempt to develop learners’ metalinguistic ability through analysing Japanese and English passives and to facilitate learners’ awareness of crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the passive constructions.