The relationship between Chinese language skills and language awareness

The paper proposes an explanatory framework of language abilities which involvesthe relationship between Chinese language skills and language awareness. It alsoexamines the differences between language awareness and yugan (語感 , languageintuition), which is a commonly used term in China. The language intuition includesthree abilities to: (1) judge whether a language unit is appropriate; (2) locate whichpart of a language unit is not appropriate; (3) correct the inappropriate part of alanguage unit. In addition to the three abilities, language awareness includes thefourth ability: (4) to give reasons for the corrections. There are no significant correlationcoefficients between the fourth ability and the first three abilities, and four languageskills; while there are close correlations coefficients between the three abilities.The findings offer an evidential basis for enhancing pedagogical procedures whichimproves language skills through upgrading language awareness.