Teaching children to use metalanguage : what they say they know

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education, 2003What should be explicitly taught to primary school children in writing has been hotly debated over a number of decades in Australia. At the heart of this debate are questions of how much knowledge about their language children can learn and how much is really useful in order to use language effectively. This study, a case study from one Year Six classroom, proposes that teaching students some overt knowledge of their language, and developing a metalanguage in the Systemic Functional Grammar tradition with which to define this knowledge, is possible and assists children to write more successfully. The study analysed the students' progress in writing texts across factual and fictional genres as well as tracking the reflections students made on their own knowledge. The students not only identified how they had been able to improve their writing, but express satisfaction in possessing such knowledge about language