Metalinguistic awareness: what is it, and why should I care?
October 2, 2009
So I’ll start by saying that my background is not in child language acquisition. My BA was in the Teaching of Spanish, so obviously there was a bit of L2 (second language) acquisition theory, but relatively little – and what there was focused on adults. My MA/PhD were in Linguistic Anthropology with a focus on language and identity within the Judeo-Spanish (a dialect of Spanish spoken by descendants of the Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492) revitalization effort. So not a lot of academic background or training on how to make a bilingual baby (when both parents are English-dominant).
And now I’m a mom, and Henry – my 3-year old – has been with Spanish-speaking caregivers since he was a few months old. I initially tried speaking to him in Spanish, but it didn’t feel natural, not only because I’m increasingly rusty from not having lived in a Spanish-speaking country since 1994 and not teaching it consistently since 1996, but also because I didn’t know how to talk baby talk in Spanish. I didn’t know how to sound like I thought I should sound and wanted to sound as the mom of a newborn. So I quickly stopped and hope I’d pick it back up at some point.
Fast-forward a few years, and it was interesting for me to watch Henry’s language development. When he first started talking, he used a mixture of English and Spanish words (‘arriba’ = up, ‘agua’ = water AND milk), but then he stopped, and I don’t remember hearing much for a while. I knew he understood, but his production was very low. He would occasionally translate discrete words from/to English<>Spanish when I requested it, but not that much. What was fascinating was what happened when we spent 3 weeks in Mexico last December, when Henry was 2 1/2. And with this, I return to the purported topic of this post: metalinguistic awareness.
We were in Merida, in the Yucatan, walking around the main plaza the Sunday after we arrived, and Henry pointed to a man and asked, ‘He talkin’ Spanish?’. It was one of the first times I could recall him explicitly talking about Spanish, and it just continued from there. ’He talkin’ English and Spanish?’ was another question soon after. And then his incessant prompting: ‘In English, window. In Spanish?’ I would supply him with the requested translation, which he would repeat, satisfied to have an answer to his question. This continued after we returned home, and one winter day, as he was getting dressed for school, he took out his mittens and declared: ‘In English, mittens. In Spanish, MEE-tehns.’ He understood enough about Spanish pronunciation to engage in multilingual word-play. I was astonished. And of course I kvelled.
So, you may ask, what does this have to do with metalinguistic awareness, and what the hell is it, anyway?! Metalinguistic awareness is exactly what I’ve been describing: knowledge about language. Barbara Zurer Pearson, in her book Raising a Bilingual Child (Living Language Series), notes that one of the advantages of bilingualism in children is that these bilingual kids become metalinguistically aware at an earlier age then monolingual children. They are forced to think about language more often, as they constantly choose which language to use and interpret what they hear. They are more aware of the formal properties and structures of language, and as a result, they are able to think abstractly about language at an earlier age. They are also able to make connections between letters and sounds, which helps with reading, and their understanding of how language works often makes them better writers, too. And abstract thought is important not just for reading and writing, but for academic success in general.
And remind me again why it is that we typically wait until high school before teaching kids a second language?
