Understanding the nature of metalinguistic activity. A case study of bilingual learners writing in their second language

This thesis presents an exploratory study of the nature of metalinguistic activity as experienced by 24 Grade-11, francophone students writing in their second language, English. The study was carried out in a French first language school in a mainly English-speaking urban centre in New Brunswick. In addition to classroom observations and documents, specific data about metalinguistic activity were collected from three writing tasks, two individual and one collaborative. The analysis of the data showed that metalinguistic activity occurred very frequently during the writing tasks. With respect to the nature of this activity, it was found to be related to a wide array of aspects of language, such as spelling, morphology, syntax and textual aspects. Moreover, metalinguistic activity emerged explicitly (in overt discussions of language aspects) and implicitly (in text reformulations and other types of utterances). One further finding was the scarcity of use of technical metalanguage by the participants. In addition to data about metalinguistic activity, the study also found information about the participants' ability to articulate their reasons for making changes to their written texts. The results of this study give a complete picture of the nature of metalinguistic activity as it was experienced by the participants and shed some light on what second language learners do when they pay attention to language. These results suggest that metalinguistic activity is an essential cognitive process within written composition. Participants often engaged in this type of activity to solve the language problems they encountered during the composition tasks. The findings regarding the degree of explicitness of metalinguistic activity and the participants' ability to reason text reformulations suggest possible differences with respect to the participants' level of language representations. Participants' individual and group metalinguistic activity showed similarities regarding aspects of language. However, further comparability was not possible. Finally, analysis of the quality of the written texts in relation to the aspects of language to which metalinguistic activity was related allows hypothesizing a possible relationship between metalinguistic activity and text quality.