The Meta-four: Metalanguage and Its Kin in L1 and L2 Writing Pedagogy
Prof. Dr Mark Stephen LeTourneau
Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
A critical component of student success is learning to write academic discourse. One contested question within this domain concerns the role of metalanguage, specifically grammatical metalanguage. Grammatical terminology is of course essential to analyzing native speakers’ introspective judgments of linguistic well- or ill-formedness as a metalinguistic act (Chomsky 1986, Williams 1986). However, there is a strong research consensus in nativelanguage writing pedagogy that instruction in formal grammar does not improve student writing (Hillocks 1986). O’Hare (1973) took the further step of showing that students who were taught sentence combining without formal grammar wrote essays judged globally superior. Similarly, in L2pedagogy, Krashen (1982) argued for a very restricted role for direct instruction
in grammar in favor of delivering comprehensible input to learners. Yet recent writing research has documented the value of both metacognition and metalinguistic awareness in improving L2 student writing (Shintani, Aubrey, and Donnellan 2016; Lee and Mak 2018; Negretti and McGrath 2018;
Hidayatun, Nurfaidah, Hamaera, and Gazaly 2021). Complementing metacognition and metalinguistic awareness is teaching metadiscourse (Williams and Bizup 2014). I propose to reconcile these apparently conflicting results by appeal to Hartwell’s (1985) five senses of grammar and the distinction between reflective and reflexive metalanguage (Trybulec 2021). I will then suggest the implications of these distinctions for L1 and L2 composition pedagogy.
Keywords: Metalanguage, writing, L1 and L2
Doi: 10.23918/vesal2022a3