Development Of Metalinguistic Awareness Research Articles

Developing an MLA-test for young learners – insights from measurement theory and language testing

This article presents the process of constructing and validating a test of metalinguistic awareness (MLA) for young school children (age 8–10). The test was developed between 2021 and 2023 as part of the MetaLearn research project, financed by The Research Council of Norway. The research team defines MLA as using metalinguistic knowledge at a point in real time. To develop the test, the research team relied heavily on general measurement theory (psychometrics) and insights from the field of language testing and assessment. This aids in the process of developing a practical and user-friendly MLA-test which yields valid scores and reliably measures the state and the development of MLA. This innovative approach to MLA testing offers explicitness about the theoretical construct of the test and at the same time contributes to controlling the difficulty and discriminatory power of each test item. We argue that the test development process presented here is useful when developing tests of MLA and similar concepts, as it facilitates comparison of results as well as replicability. This development process and its detailed description also make it possible to adapt the MetaLearn MLA-test to other contexts.

<i>Du Iz Tak?</i>

This paper presents the results of the introduction to a project inspired by the éveil aux langues approach with the storytelling of the picture book Du Iz Tak? by the American/Canadian author Carson Ellis (2016). This propaedeutic activity was a multimodal input given in an unknown language to all children, namely an invented language. The aim of this study is to bring more evidence on how the development of metalinguistic awareness at a young age can help pupils meet their learning needs, especially pupils with SEN. Results show that telling a story in a invented language through the use of multimodal resources to convey meaning not only captures the attention of all pupils in the class, but leads them to observe and manipulate this language by making and developing hypotheses about languages, especially pupils with SEN.

The acquisition of infinitive and gerund as complements in ESL by Mexican undergraduates

Metalinguistic awareness has been assessed primarily throughout metalinguistic knowledge and grammaticality judgment tests. Then, very limited research has been conducted on the attempt to understand how metalinguistic awareness may be developed among adolescents or young adults in verbal group reflection tasks. The present study aims to explore the performance of university students when they reflect on gerund and infinitive complements in English as L2 while they complete consciousness-raising grammar tasks with the intention to develop their metalinguistic awareness. The study links a sociocultural framework with semi-structured stimulated recall interviews on the development of metalinguistic awareness, as both help participants reflect on usage patterns and generalizations of underlying linguistic structures through verbal interaction. The evaluated data consisted of the scores of each task and the speech analysis of the participants. The results reveal that having students identify the underlying rules of gerund and infinitive complements will indirectly contribute to their acquisition. The conclusions pointed to students paying attention to specific features of the language to be fully aware of the form of the linguistic patterns.

From the Queen's English to reclaiming indigenous languages: An African poetic perspective

From the Queen's English to reclaiming indigenous languages: An African poetic perspective

Metalinguistic Awareness is an Important Factor for Developing EFL Students’ Performance in Learning English Language

The development of metalinguistic awareness is an essential component of teacher preparation. Enhancing students' metalinguistic understanding of their different skill successes is essential. As a result, teachers should use a range of techniques for increasing metalinguistic awareness, such as word recognition, syntactic understanding, and vocabulary recognition exercises. However, these strategies are exclusively geared toward school-aged children. Because metalinguistic awareness is a component of all levels of education. Numerous studies have demonstrated that effective learners self-regulate their learning processes using metacognitive information and strategies. Effective learners demonstrate a high level of language control and analysis in a language learning context. It is therefore critical to foster learners' metalinguistic awareness, as metalinguistic awareness enables learners to exert greater control over their oral and written communication abilities. Additionally, it enables children to understand the significance of the messages they read or hear. Additionally, to the fact that they may greatly favour career prospects, these two benefits have an effect on learners' social status.

Development of Metalinguistic Awareness in EFL Vocabulary and Spelling: A Longitudinal Case Study of a Child and Adult with Dyslexia

This longitudinal case study aimed at investigating the development of metalin- guistic awareness in EFL spelling and vocabulary in two Croatian learners with dyslexia who differed in age and language proficiency – a child and an adult. They attended weekly sessions that aimed at improving their English spelling and vocabulary. The data were collected for 45 weeks using the teacher’s notes and audio-recorded lesson observations. The results showed that the participants developed their metalinguistic skills; however, the age and language proficiency factor was salient. Also, the metacognitive component of the instruction had a different effect on the development of metalinguistic skills in spelling and vocabulary acquisition. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Exploring the Relationship Between Multilingual Learning Experience, Metalinguistic Knowledge, and Metalinguistic Awareness

The last two decades have witnessed a considerable increase in interest in Third or Additional Language Acquisition (TLA). The positive effects of bilingualism in TLA have related the advantages evident in bilingual learners to the influence of bilingualism on cognitive development and, specifically, Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA). The paper aims, first, at providing a comprehensive portrait of what MLA is, considering the complexity of this factor, its linguistic and cognitive nature along the implicit - explicit continuum. Second, it disentangles the intricate relationship between TLA on one hand, and the development of MLA and other mediating factors on the other, including level of bilingualism, literacy, age of acquisition of the L2, language use, and language knowledge. Third, the work focuses on a factor that has been the object of an intense debate in psycholinguistics, i.e. the role of awareness in the language learning process, to shed light on the different aspects distinguishing Metalinguistic Knowledge (MLK) and Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) of the language. A comprehensive analysis of the most influential literature in the field, comparing contrasting perspectives of study, will be propounded to offer a comprehensive overview of the discussed phenomena to better understand the impact they have on multilingual education.

Making Language Aware: Writing and Narrative

Writing and narrative are commonly taken to be two separate fields of research and scholarly reflection. In this paper, I offer some thoughts on how they are related, using David Olson’s work on literacy and the development of metalinguistic awareness as a frame of reasoning. As Olson has shown, language is not only a form and practice of communication and representation, but also a symbolic practice that makes us aware of language itself, especially of its constructive, reflexive, and creative potentials. Against this background, I argue that both writing and narrative can be seen as powerful practices of language awareness; examining them allows us to better understand the cultural nexus of mind and language.

In the order of words

This study investigates, from a sociocultural perspective on communication and learning, translating as a joint activity and how it supports the development of metalinguistic awareness in children. Data in the form of audio recordings were generated in an English immersion preschool in Finland. In the analysed activity, the participants are engaged in a discussion around word order when translating the lyrics to a children’s song. The study shows how the teacher scaffolds the children’s language learning through providing contrast and using qualifying markers important to promoting the development of metalinguistic awareness. More generally, the study shows how a translation activity can function as a language-learning practice in bilingual early childhood education.

Modelos de aprendizaje léxico basados en la morfología derivativa

In recent years it has been debated whether the development of metalinguistic awareness allows the speakers to improve their verbal communication of the mother tongue. This paper presents a didactic model for metalinguistic ref ection of the derivative process in Spanish that, after its experimentation in a classroom with high school students, tests its validity for lexical enrichment. The model is based on Bybee’s theories about the processing and morphological organization of the mental lexicon, on connectionism and on cognitive linguistics. It consists in showing connected words, either by being part of the same lexical family or by sharing affi xes, so that the students expand the connected schemes and relate the given words to others. This activity is made from online databases (a stemmer and a reverse dictionary). The experimentation of the model has been carried into de classroom with the families of bueno and genio and with the derived forms with -al and ex-. Practice shows its efficiency and profitability.

On bilinguals’ development of metalinguistic awareness and its transfer to L3 learning: The role of language characteristics

Aims: With language characteristics shown to be a factor mediating bilinguals’ metalinguistic awareness, the present study attempts to give a clearer picture of the impact of language characteristics, avoiding confounds such as exposure opportunities and language experiences, which previous studies with comparisons made between monolinguals and bilinguals were subject to. Design: Two groups of bilinguals speaking the same first language (L1) but different second languages (L2s) were tested for their performance on a morphosyntactic awareness task. Other confounds (L1 proficiency and nonverbal intelligence) were statistically controlled. Data and Analysis: After five outliers were deleted, data from 22 Chinese–English bilinguals and 20 Chinese–Southern Min bilinguals were analyzed, by mainly using analyses of covariance. Findings: The results showed that, with nonverbal intelligence and Chinese proficiency controlled for, Chinese–English bilinguals scored significantly higher than their counterparts only on the past tense suffix task, one tested feature in which Chinese and English differ but which both Chinese and Southern Min lack. They did not, however, differ on the other contrasting feature, present suffix, probably due to its inconsistent presence in English. The two groups showed no difference on subject–object–verb and inflectional negation features that both their L1s and L2s lack. Originality: Unlike the metalinguistic awareness measure (grammatical error detection and correction) commonly used in previous studies, our task was adapted into a version using an unlearned third language (L3) (Japanese), which could reflect children’s cross-language transfer of metalinguistic knowledge. Besides, our metamorphological awareness measure was focused on inflectional morphology, whose influence on the bilingual advantage should be important but has yet received scant attention in the earlier literature. Significance: The overall results cross-validated the important role of language characteristics in bilinguals’ development of metalinguistic awareness and suggested that the metamorphological awareness is likely to facilitate bilinguals’ learning of an L3.

Bilingual education searching for promising didactic proposals.

Bilingual education searching for promising didactic proposals.

Early development of metalinguistic awareness in Japanese: Evidence from pragmatic and phonological aspects of language

The development of metalinguistic awareness for linguistic politeness was examined in 68 Japanese-speaking children aged between three and five years old. A politeness judgement task was administered together with several phonological judgement tasks and false-belief tasks. Four- and five-year old Japanese children, but not three-year-olds, made correct judgements for polite and impolite linguistic expressions by matching the expressions to appropriate social attitudes on the part of the protagonists. Developmental transitions across the age groups were similar for politeness and phonological judgements, with the exception of onset detection. Politeness and phonological judgement performances correlated with each other and were independent of the children’s age and receptive vocabulary. However, neither of the aspects correlated with false-belief understanding once age and vocabulary were accounted for. The findings suggest that pragmatic awareness of politeness register develops as early as four years old, in synchrony with phonological aspects at the syllable level.

Understanding the potential in elementary classrooms through Dynamic Assessment

This paper reports on a research project aiming to investigate a Dynamic Assessment (DA) approach to the development of academic writing for 7-year-old new immigrant English language learners in elementary classrooms. The research design entailed a case study methodology focusing on the application of iterative cycles of DAs aimed at improving students’ writing abilities in relationship with the development of metalinguistic awareness in the native (Spanish) and target (English) languages. Two third-grade ELLs and their teacher participated in the case study presented in this article. Findings indicate that unlike more traditional types of assessment, the DA approach more readily enabled the teacher to recognize and access the ELLs’ zone of proximal development and thus to create instructional means to support their learning. Both students demonstrated significant gains in their ability to write in English at the end of the DA cycle. Findings suggest that the DA interactions were helpful in increasing metalinguistic awareness, especially as it allowed for the explicit use of the students’ native language as a kind of parameter and therefore as a tool for thinking and for mediating the development of academic English in textual form. Also, DA emerged as a more accurate diagnostic tool to understand recent-immigrant students’ potential abilities in communicating in the target language than more traditional forms of assessment.

Producing bilinguals through immersion education: Development of metalinguistic awareness.

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enrolled in either a French immersion or a regular English program. All children were from monolingual English-speaking homes and attended local public schools in middle socioeconomic neighborhoods. Measures included morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and verbal fluency, with all testing in English. These tasks differed in their need for executive control, a cognitive ability that is enhanced in bilingual children. Overall, the metalinguistic advantages reported in earlier research emerged gradually, with advantages for tasks requiring more executive control (grammaticality judgment) appearing later and some tasks improving but not exceeding performance of monolinguals (verbal fluency) even by fifth grade. These findings demonstrate the gradual emergence of changes in metalinguistic concepts associated with bilingualism over a period of about 5 years. Performance on English-language proficiency tasks was maintained by French immersion children throughout in spite of schooling being conducted in French.

Data analysis of Chinese characters in primary school corpora of Hong Kong and mainland China: preliminary theoretical interpretations

Metalinguistic awareness (an awareness about the structure of orthography) had been considered vital for reading acquisition. The awareness of phonological regularity and consistency had been found in advanced readers in recent research. Evidence based on simplified Chinese suggested the effect of semantic transparency on reading in school readers. Studies based on traditional Chinese also reported that reading acquisition, including the development of metalinguistic awareness, is affected by script, properties of characters in school curricula, approaches and strategies of reading training. This paper reports the comparison between corpora of simplified Chinese characters based on primary school textbooks and the updated Hong Kong Corpus of Primary School Chinese (HKCPSC). The proportion of characters in the total curriculum, the ratio of phonetic‐semantic compounds, visual complexity (defined by the number of strokes) and the levels of phonetic regularity and semantic transparency of Chinese characters across grades in the two corpora are compared. Two marked differences found are the frequency‐weighted proportion of regular characters and the proportion of semantically transparent characters across grades. The relationships between the data and recent findings of reading development in Chinese are discussed.

Literacy, Second Language Learning, and the Development of Metalinguistic Awareness: A Study of Bilingual Children’s Perceptions of Focus on Form

The following study reports findings from an assessment of bilingual children’s editing and correction strategies as applied to writing samples produced in response to a structured composition task. A total sample of 479 attempts at editing/correction was recorded and analyzed for the purpose of describing what appear to be developmental tendencies across the elementary grades. The 45 subjects from a bilingual indigenous community in Central Mexico were also evaluated on a series of academic language and literacy tasks, as well as an assessment of metalinguistic awareness related to the two languages which they speak or understand (Spanish and Náhuatl). The article examines the relationship among factors related to bilingual proficiency, literacy learning, and the development of metalinguistic awareness.

Literacy and Children's Conception of Words

Children's development of metalinguistic awareness has typically been portrayed as a product of more general development processes, or else as a natural consequence of speaking a language. In contrast, we suggest that, at least for certain properties of speech, literacy plays an essential role in the development of metalinguistic awareness by providing a model of the linguistic categories which are used to reflect on spoken language. This hypothesis was tested in two studies that examined the development of children's understanding of the concept of WORD. The first study investigated young children's understanding of the representational nature of writing. It was found that, even before they are functionally literate, children understand that writing represents the spoken word. The second study investigated the relationship of this early understanding of literacy to children's metalinguistic concept of word. It was found that children's understanding of word as a unit of speech was predicted by their awareness of word as a piece of written text. The results are discussed in relation to the MODEL hypothesis of literacy (Olson 1994), and are related to previous findings on children's metalinguistic understanding.

Literacy in School and Society: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives

I. Sociolinguistic Analyses and Perspectives.- 1: On the Notion and Implications of the Concept of Mother Tongue in Literacy Education in a Multilingual Context: The Case of Zambia.- 2: Issues and Trends in Early Bilingual Literacy in Brazil.- 3: Non-English-Language Ethnic Community Schools in the USA: Instruments of More Than Literacy and Less Than Literacy.- 4: The Development of Bilingual Literacy Skills: Experiences with Immersion Education.- 5: Ancestral Language Training and the Development of Bilingual Literacy: A Canadian Perspective.- 6: The Use of Creole as a School Medium and Decreolization in Haiti.- 7: Catalan and Castilian in School: A First Evaluation.- 8: Implications of Defining Literacy as a Major Goal of Teaching the Mother Tongue in a Multicultural Society: The Dutch Situation.- 9: Literacy Problems in Hungary.- 10: Multilingual Education in Britain: The State of the Art.- II. Psycholinguistic, Linguistic, and Educational Issues and Problems.- 11: Psychoeducational Language Awareness Assessment and Early Reading.- 12: The Development of Metalinguistic Awareness and the Acquisition of Formal Speech in Mother-Tongue Education.- 13: Evaluation of Text Reading Comprehension: Results of a Research at the End of Primary School and in Junior High School.- 14: Problems of Written Comprehension and Production in Children: A Textual-Pragmatic Study.- 15: Standard Language Acquisition by the Swiss-German Dialect-Speaking Child.- 16: Oral Reading Practice: An Institutional Constraint on the Development of Functional Literacy.- 17: The Initial Reading Scheme: Is There an Alternative?.- 18: Learning to Read and Write: The Results of an Experiment.- 19: Early Bilingual Reading: Retrospects and Prospects.- 20: Problems of Language Growth and the Preparation of Schoolbooks in Africa.

The development of metalinguistic awareness and its relation to reading achievement

The relation between certain aspects of metalinguistic ability and reading, e.g., morpho-phonological ability and reading, has been well documented in the literature. What has not been fully discussed is the relation between structural-relational (semantic-syntactic) linguistic knowledge and reading development. This study examined two types of questions about this relation: (a) which aspects of structural-relational metalinguistic awareness in what forms and during which age periods are significantly related to reading achievement? and (b) what is the relation between metalinguistic awareness in oral language processing and written language processing? Sixty-four subjects, from fourth graders to adults, participated in the study. Each subject was asked to judge and produce corrections of nongrammatical, anomalous, and ambiguous stimulus items in sentences and passages. These items were presented in both oral and written modes. Results indicated that reading achievement and age were positively related to metalinguistic ability. Subjects were better able to judge than produce correct forms. While ambiguity was the most difficult task, nongrammaticality was the most discriminating task. Good readers' performance on oral tasks equalled their performance on written tasks by adulthood.