Bilingualism, writing, and metalinguistic awareness: Oral-literate interactions between first and second languages

This article reports on an investigation of the development of literacy, bi lingualism, and metalinguistic awareness. The particular context of the stu dy (high levels of bilingualism among school-age children) and the particul ar language contact situation (an indigenous language) offer a vantage poin t on the interaction between language learning and metalinguistic awareness and take into account the sociolinguistic imbalances that characterize bil ingual communities of this type. The subjects who participated in the study were speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl from Central Mexico. Assessments of m etalinguistic awareness related to different aspects of the children's cons ciousness of the languages they spoke or understood were compared to a seri es of assessments of reading comprehension, writing, and oral narrative in both languages. Findings suggest directions for further research along the following lines: metalinguistic awareness is related to different aspects o f literacy development in different ways, the key variables being the degre e of decontextualization and expressive versus receptive language tasks.