Multilingual Language Awareness and Teacher Education

Abstract

In the last two decades, we have developed a substantial, although incomplete, body of knowledge about what teachers need to know and be able to do, to build on and/or develop many languages and lit-eracies present in twenty-first century classrooms and communities. Less understood, however, is how to educate teachers in ways that ensure not only the acquisition of those understandings, but also the teachers' enactment of those understandings in their teaching, as well as the relationship that this kind of teaching holds for their children's learning. This chapter starts out by describing different kinds of lan-guage awareness that are necessary in diverse schools, specifically focusing on what we call multilingual awareness (MLA) for today's multilingual schools.