Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Mike Sharwood 

Title: Explaining metalinguistic knowledge

Abstract: Metalinguistic knowledge for most people is explicit knowledge ‘about’ language, any aspect of it. Its use and acquisition are frequently associated closely with conscious awareness. Its cognitive status has attracted discussion and controversy especially in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature of the late nineteen seventies, much the empirical research in SLA and bi/multilingualism that followed has assumed that this concept needs no explanation or has been described in more precise terms as explicit as opposed to implicit knowledge or declarative as opposed to procedural knowledge. This presentation will adopt a multi-systems perspective, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), in order to explain in more detail how metalinguistic knowledge is created, stored and processed online, how it is related to metacognition in general and especially to suggest why how metagrammatical knowledge has proved a stumbling block for more economical explanations of language cognition. If the knowledge of some aspect of grammar which was originally acquired and practised consciously and explicitly can also be used in unreflecting performance, i.e. implicitly, one glaring problem remains. Frequent explicit grammatical instruction has not been shown to regularly and directly influence unreflecting grammatical performance. This is not what one would expect if instruction worked in the same way as it seems to do for explicit knowledge of, for example, the Edinburgh transport system, the history of Edinburgh or the geography of Scotland. The MCF has a straightforward answer to this.