An Empirical Research On Chinese College Third Language Learners’ Metalinguistic Awareness

Third language acquisition which has both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic groundsis a relatively new area of study in applied linguistics. Previous research has indicated thatunder specific conditions learning an additional language has tremendous advantages in bothlinguistic competence and cognitive and social development. And the development ofcompetence in two languages can result in higher levels of metalinguistic awareness and othercognitive abilities. According to Bialystok and Ryan, metalinguistic awareness includes twocognitive processes: analysis and control. Bilinguals have universal advantages in control,while only bilinguals who have achieved high levels of proficiency in both languages areconsidered as having advantage on tasks which require more analyzed linguistic knowledge.However, research on metalinguistic awareness of college third language learners is stillscant and most of the studies have been carried out in European context other than China sofar. Therefore, based on previous research results, the present study employs Theory ofAnalysis and Control to explore the general situation of metalinguistic awareness of thirdlanguage learners in Chinese universities; and the effect of proficiency of their priorlanguages on the level of metalinguistic awareness. The research questions are thenformulated as:(1) What metalinguistic awareness do college third and second language learners haveafter they have been learning in universities for one and a half years?(2) To what degree do third language learners differ from second language learners inmetalinguistic awareness?(3) To what extent does their prior language proficiency correlate with metalinguisticawareness of third language learners?The subjects of the present study were recruited from sophomores in three universities inShandong province according to their English and Chinese scores in National MatriculationTest in2011. There were180third language learners and60second language learners. Thethird language learners were composed of60English majors,60Japanese majors and60Korean majors.The present research is mainly quantitative in nature, and supplemented by qualitativedata. Regarding the quantitative data, the Metalinguistic Ability Test3was used to measureparticipants’ metalinguistic awareness. Of the qualitative data, semi-conducted interviewswere carried out to get access to third language learners’ metalinguistic awareness. The results of interviews served as the supplement for the quantitative study.All the data collected from quantitative research were analyzed by SPSS16.0.Descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and data from interviews were used todescribe the current situation of metalinguistic awareness of third language learners inChinese universities and their advantage in metalinguistic awareness over second languagelearners. Pearson correlation analysis was employed to explore the relationship betweenproficiency of prior languages and metalinguistic awareness of the third language learners.And another independent samples t-test was run to probe the differences in metalinguisticawareness between high-and low-proficiency third language learners.The results showed that1) the level of metalinguistic awareness in third languagelearners is significantly higher than that of second language learners in Chinese universities;2)Metalinguistic awareness of third language learner is positively and significantly correlatedwith their proficiency of prior languages, but the correlation coefficient is slightly low;3)Metalinguistic awareness difference between high-and low-proficiency third languagelearners is significant. The high-proficiency third language learners show a higher level ofmetalinguistic awareness than the low-proficiency ones.