ABSTRACT
It has generally been agreed in the literature that metalinguistic awareness plays a critical role in reading development (e.g. Gombert, 1992; Mattingly, 1984; Nagy & Anderson, 1998). Yet despite the agreement, the term “metalinguistic awareness” has not received a consistent interpretation and thus tends to refer to different constructs in different studies. Resolving these inconsistencies is important because the conceptualization of “metalinguistic awareness” provides the theoretical framework that guides research designs, data analyses, and interpretations of findings. Understanding differences in the conceptualization of “metalinguistic awareness” is particularly important when it comes to cross-language research, because only with a consistent framework can comparisons across languages be meaningful. Otherwise, there is no way to be certain whether the differences found in cross-language studies result from different courses of metalinguistic awareness development across languages or from different conceptualizations of metalinguistic awareness.
