Language Awareness in a Bidialectal Setting: The Oral Performance and Language Attitudes of Urban and Rural Students in Cyprus

Abstract

This study addresses bidialectism in the context of language education by empirically assessing how explicit knowledge about language influences bidialectal students’ linguistic performance and language attitudes. A language-learning programme based on Language Awareness was applied in the bidialectal community of Cyprus with the primary aim of improving oral performance in urban and rural speakers’ second variety, the standard. Improvement was defined as a reduction of Cypriot dialectal interference in students’ Standard Modern Greek speech. A second aim was to document and subsequently identify changes in students’ language attitudes towards their two linguistic varieties. Quantitative analyses of the results reveal that the Language Awareness programme produced a marked improvement in students’ oral production of the standard variety and in their language attitudes.