| This study investigated several possible relationships between metalinguistic awareness (MLA) and adult literacy. A series of phonological and syntactic metalinguistic tasks was administered to four groups of adult readers (at low, mid, high and literate levels) in order to research differences among the groups in overall and specific metalinguistic awareness. The tasks included word, syllable and phoneme segmentation; sentential well-formedness and synonymy judgments; phonotactic judgments and oral comprehension. It was hypothesized that reading enhances MLA; thus, MLA would increase across reading levels. Further, we researched whether MLA enhances reading achievement via a longitudinal study of the lowest level readers. MLA and reading abilities were assessed before and after six months of reading instruction. It was predicted that subjects with above average MLA would have greater reading achievement than those with below average MLA. Finally, we investigated whether those low level readers who achieve above average reading gain also achieve above average metalinguistic gain.;The longitudinal study revealed that more subjects with above average MLA achieved reading gains than their below average peers; further, the above average group achieved greater reading gain than the below average group. Finally, those subjects with above average reading improvement scores improved more in metalinguistic development than subjects with low reading improvement scores though the difference was not statistically significant.;It was concluded that some metalinguistic skills develop spontaneously (e.g., word segmentation) regardless of reading though others are influenced by literacy acquisition (e.g., syllable segmentation). Finally, it is argued that pedagogical applications of metalinguistic activities are needed for adult literacy learning.;The results revealed a significant overall difference in metalinguistic abilities among the four reading groups; MLA increased as reading level rose. More specifically, the best indicator of reading level was syllable segmentation ability. As with previous children studies, it was found that adults performed best at word segmentation skills followed by syllable and then phoneme segmentation skills; further, phonotactic judgments were significantly better than phoneme segmentation abilities at all reading levels. Moreover, syntactic skills were greater than phonological skills, though specific syntactic skills were significantly different between certain reading levels. |
