Grammatical Concepts and Metalinguistic Awareness in First-Year College Writers: A Study of Reading Journals

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading journals in which they were asked to articulate observations about language used in academic texts. Analysis of responses suggests the students in the study are more likely to address word choice and tone than syntax when attending to the language of a text. Despite relative lack of syntactic metalanguage in student responses, there is evidence of developing metalinguistic awareness. Results suggest a need for research in grammatical concept formation and pedagogy for first-year composition and integrated reading and writing instruction.