Consciousness raising tasks: Developing learners’ reflective attitude toward plurilingualism

This report proposes a number of tasks which help learners become more aware of how their feelings are moulded in their L1 and notice crosslinguistic similarities and differences between their L1 and a target language. The proposed tasks are motivated by findings in the crosslinguistic influence literature and a study that investigated Japanese learners’ perception of crosslinguistic similarities and differences between English and Japanese passives. Japanese has two types of passives, while English has only one. Although the two types of Japanese passives share some properties, they have distinctive functions; one type is mainly used to express adversative feelings of the speaker towards the event a sentence describes, while the other is much the same as the English passive. The study results indicate that half of the subjects perceive crosslinguistic similarities yet avoid using the construction and the other half incorrectly assume similarities which do not exist in reality. The proposed tasks attempt to develop learners’ metalinguistic ability through analysing Japanese and English passives and to facilitate learners’ awareness of crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the passive constructions.

‘To define means to say what you know about things’: the development of definitional skills as metalinguistic acquisition

Some authors have suggested that definitional skills include metalinguistic components (Watson, 1985; Snow, 1990; McGhee-Bidlack, 1991). The present study therefore empirically investigated relations between the ability to define words and level of metalinguistic awareness in 280 Italian children (with ages ranging from 5 to 11 years) and in two groups of 40 adults each (with low and high educational levels, respectively). We used a definitional task presenting 24 terms (nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which were either concrete or abstract) and a task examining 6 different aspects of metalinguistic awareness. Our aim was to demonstrate that metalinguistic skills can positively predict the formal quality of definitions and to identify various aspects of metalinguistic skills that might be directly related to definitional skills. Results showed better performance on both tasks as a function of age and educational level; they also confirmed the important roles of metalinguistic ability and educational level in producing well-structured formal definitions.

Metalinguistic aspects of bilingual processing

This chapter examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, but equally, other studies have found either no difference between the groups, or, in some cases, monolingual advantages. In the discussion of each of these areas, the kinds of tasks for which bilingual and monolingual children perform differently are identified. In none of these three subcategories of metalinguistic awareness do bilingual children exhibit a uniform and consistent advantage over monolinguals. An alternate conception of metalinguistic ability is proposed in which two cognitive processes, analysis and control, are directly responsible for task performance. These processes are involved in all metalinguistic tasks but to different degrees. Re-examining the results in this way reveals that bilingual advantages occur reliably on tasks that make high demands on control but are not evident in tasks that make high demands on analysis. The implications of this pattern for metalinguistic ability are considered.

Metalinguistic ability and primary linguistic data

The role of metalinguistic ability in L2 development is seriously underestimated. It may be seen both (1) as a means of initiating or boosting the flow of primary linguistic data and (2) as a generator of substitute knowledge (derived, but epistemologically distinct from domain-specific knowledge) that may compete with or compensate for perceived gaps in the learners current underlying competence. It cannot serve as a simple means of distinguishing the rival theoretical positions.