Abstract
When native and non-native teachers are compared in terms of teaching performance, the focus of comparison tends to be preferred teaching styles, pedagogical content knowledge, metalinguistic awareness and the ability to use the target language in the classroom. An aspect of teacher language awareness that has received relatively little attention in the literature is sensitivity to the language difficulties experienced by L2 learners. Ideally, a language teacher should be able to identify and focus attention on language their students find difficult. Yet students often complain that teachers waste time by explaining language they already understand and ignoring language they do not.
This chapter reports some of the empirical work undertaken with native and non-native teachers and their success in identifying language that students find difficult. The results suggest that teachers who know their students’ L1 are more likely to be aware of sources of difficulty in reading materials. However, large individual differences exist among both native and non-native speaker teachers. The chapter also considers whether awareness of difficult language should be regarded as part of Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) and how teacher education might help to sensitize trainee teachers to sources of language difficulty from a learner’s perspective.
