‘Not Knowing is Hence, Not Loving’ The Significance of Raising Language Awareness Amongst Teachers of Content Area Learning

Listening to or speaking another language that we do not know or rarely use can be a daunting or even a frustrating experience in communication. Similarly, for language not to be addressed in content area, teaching and learning may hence do a disservice to students especially ones that find learning in another language challenging. Thus ‘Not knowing is hence not loving’, a literal translation from a well-known Malay saying “Tak kenal maka tak cinta” is deliberately chosen as a title for this paper to encapsulate that simple connection between knowing and loving i.e. to know is to love in relation to this issue. This paper believes in the importance of consistently taking initiatives of wanting to know and finding out about language issues that surrounds teaching and learning as comprehensively as possible for teaching to be more inclusive of addressing one of many possible learning problems i.e. language barriers. It draws on discussions of the phenomenon of a second or foreign language as a medium of instruction especially in relation to English language in Brunei. The paper recommends for language integration to feature in content area teaching and learning to better address languagerelated problems and to promote that 'love' which is enhanced learning of content. Keywords-bilingual education, language proficiency, content area learning, CLIL