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8 Metalinguistic Awareness, Bilingualism, and Writing Chapter 7 returned to the primary focus of our study of bilingual competence and proficiency: the abilities that develop in school associated with learning how to read and write. As we saw, some of these abilities are observable in other kinds of language use, in problem solving and creative endeavor. Some of the same component knowledge structures and skills are shared with abilities related to listening comprehension and oral expression. As Cummins (2000) points out, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency is not the same as literacy ability. Along the same lines, research has shown that as children become skilled in decoding, measures of reading comprehension correlate highly with measures of oral comprehension (Gernsbacher 1990). Thus, just as we propose that in bilingualism, these “central” knowledge structures are not language-specific, so we can propose the same, to a certain extent, for modality: they are not completely specific to written language either. But for a number of good reasons, how children develop advanced academic abilities is most amenable to study in the area of literacy. Literacy is the primary learning objective of schooling in the elementary grades and should be prominent among the concerns of child language researchers for this reason alone. This chapter will present findings from another phase of the Mexican study on the development of academic language proficiency, children’s writing ability—and in particular one aspect of this ability, children’s correction, revision, and editing of their own compositions. A second theme explored in chapter 7 was how academic language proficiency can be analyzed along two dimensions: secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness. With this possible connection (between the two dimensions) in mind, the project looked to the analysis of self-correction strategies as a good place to begin in designing the assessments. One might argue that attention to language forms is an integral part of successful performance in writing (as opposed to in reading, for example); or perhaps attention to form is more important in writing than in reading (chapter 9 will return to this idea). So asking children to reread their compositions for the purpose of revising them should bring this kind of awareness about language, and the ability to perform operations on language form, to 204 Chapter 8 the forefront even more. The children were asked to do this in both of the languages that they know. (We also had the good fortune of possessing adequate writing samples on which to base this experiment.) The findings will be reviewed in the order in which the studies were conducted: first the results from Spanish writing and then the results from Nahuatl writing. The sections that describe the assessments go into some detail, though without most of the tables and statistical details that can easily be obtained elsewhere (N. Francis 2004, 2005). Since this is the first study to be carried out that involves correction of writing samples from an indigenous language, our goal is to provide enough information for replicating it. More importantly, given this study’s limitations as an exploratory assessment restricted to the description of correlations and tendencies, a new series of studies, implementing a more powerful design, might pick up where it left off. For now, the results are interesting because they shed some light on the relationship between secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness. Chapter 9, which will describe a parallel assessment of self-correction in reading, will leave some room for cautious speculation in chapter 10 about where this line of research might lead, and where it shouldn’t lead. 8.1 Metalinguistic Development and Bilingualism In one way or another, the role of focus on language form has been a recurring theme in all of the subdisciplines of language learning. For some time, researchers have been interested in the possible connections between metalinguistic awareness and literacy (Garner 1992; Morais 2003) and bilingualism (M. Schwartz, Leikin, and Share 2005; Swain 1998; Wenden 1998). As suggested in chapter 7, all of the research on language awareness and literacy applies to bilingual learners. A related question (surely more controversial) is whether bilingualism and L2 learning might be causally related to some aspect of metalinguistic development. The question can also be asked about the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and L2 learning in the other direction. Chapters 6 and 7 touched on some ways of approaching this issue, which has been debated for a number of years now: can metalinguistic knowledge boost or...

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