3.1

I wrote down that everybody dreams, even deaf and blind people are capable of experiencing full dreams. The text by Blechner concludes the same thing: dreams are abstract and a physiological predicate, everyone is able to experience them. It doesn’t matter if you speak a language or not, because the brain speaks its own language, which is meaningful without necessarily being communicative.

 

3.2

Language awareness is important for teachers because you need to understand when there are moments that students may struggle. An example of this is pronouncing loves with a s instead of a z because Dutch words don’t end in a z. Furthermore, if you as a teacher understand the language, then you are able to help students to reach a higher level of understanding too.

For children it is important to learn that they have to speak to adults differently than to other children, otherwise some adults may find them impolite. This is one of the many examples why it is important to make people, especially young people, aware of the effects of language.

Language awareness also opens up new possibilities for the teaching of languages in schools. You can compare, for example, Dutch words to English words and explain how they resemble each other, or how they don’t resemble each other. The Dutch word “boom” (tree) has a entirely  different meaning than the English word “boom” (explosion). You could make a funny cartoon to show the difference between the two and to stress that it is important to not always literally translate words to other languages, even if they look the same. This is just one of the many examples of why it is important to make students aware of the English language and its differences and similarities with other languages.