Pedagogical linguistics: Connecting formal linguistics to language teaching

Abstract: This article reports on the beginning of a new pan-European enterprise called pedagogical linguistics, which can be distinguished from related approaches on several grounds. Crucially, pedagogical linguistics centers on teaching structural properties of 'language', not just properties of specific languages. Although this crosslinguistic perspective on language is already part of language practitioners' training, student teachers are often not able to draw the connection between formal linguistic training and their teaching in a multilingual classroom. Pedagogical linguistics addresses this lack of awareness and therefore aims at raising 'linguistic' awareness (in addition to language awareness) by highlighting the relevance of formal structural concepts for language pedagogy.