Introduction

In the second language acquisition (SLA) literature, the adjective metalinguistic not only appears in combination with the noun awareness, but also in combination with knowledge, ability, capacity and skill, among others. In applied linguistics research concerned with SLA in instructed learners, researchers tend to conceptualise metalinguistic awareness in terms of explicit knowledge about language. Taking metalinguistics on its own, it has been suggested that it is “concerned with linguistic activity which focuses on language”, in the sense that attention is focused on language as an object in its own right. E. Bialystok argues convincingly that in order to be a meaningful concept, metalinguistic ability has to be both distinct from and related to linguistic ability. Importantly, Bialystok favours a process-oriented, continuous view over binary, categorical divisions between constructs, so linguistic/cognitive processes are characterised as more or less metalinguistic rather than as either linguistic or metalinguistic. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.