ABSTRACT
It is increasingly acknowledged that some children have difficulty developing text comprehension skills, even if their decoding skills are good. The chapters
in this volume present many useful interventions to foster comprehension skills. In particular, there is increasing emphasis on the use of metacognitive strategies: sets of mental tools that children can use strategically to improve their understanding of text. These approaches tend to focus on helping children to develop and apply articulated knowledge, such as that of typical structures of text (e.g., chap. 8, this volume) and the child’s own domain knowledge (chap. 4, this volume). However, surprisingly little work has addressed the role in comprehension of metalinguistic awareness, the ability to adopt a reflective attitude toward the comprehension and production of oral and written language (Gombert, 1992). Being able to reflect on, analyze, and talk about language would seem to be a natural precursor to the intelligent use of any metacognitive strategy in reading: For example, how could one summarize the main ideas of a text without being able to reflect on or analyze what those ideas were?
