Abstract
For a start let us suppose that metalinguistic awareness includes the ability to think about language and comment on it. A linguist or a language-learner studying a grammar of an unfamiliar language is acquiring one type of metalinguistic awareness. But in the more interesting case, the fluent speaker of a language typically has some awareness of the language that he or she speaks. We might say that a speaker exhibits metalinguistic awareness when that speaker is attending to some part of what he or she knows about the language, and also knows that he or she possesses that knowledge.
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Read, C. (1978). Children’s Awareness of Language, with Emphasis on Sound Systems. In: Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R.J., Levelt, W.J.M. (eds) The Child’s Conception of Language. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 2. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67155-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67155-5_5
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