Development in Metalinguistic Understanding and its relationship to development in writing.

在国家和国际上对学校考试和工作场所的写作标准表示关切的背景下，迫切需要更多地了解学生成为有能力的自主作家的方式。许多研究强调了元认知和自我调节在写作中的重要性，表明写作不仅仅是关于产出，也是关于选择和控制。元语言理解(关于语言的知识)是这种控制的一个因素，但令人惊讶的是，我们对这种理解是如何发展的，或者它如何支持写作发展知之甚少。因此，本研究试图探讨元语言理解与写作发展之间的关系；换言之，学生越来越能够清晰地表达哪些元语言理解，以及他们越来越能够在写作中表现出什么。在这样做的过程中，它将两个互补的研究线索结合在一起。首先，本研究旨在了解9-14岁青年作家的元语言理解是如何发展的。现有的元语言理解研究没有考虑到年长作家的这一点，而是把重点放在早期写作、口语发展和双语学习者上。因此，我们对中期元语言发展的轨迹没有经验证据的理解。同时，我们对元语言发展和写作发展之间的关系的认识也是有限的。一般来说，有一种假设认为，元语言的发展先于语言表现，但在写作环境中，重要的是询问更多的元语言理解是否会导致写作成绩的提高，或者写作表现是否领先于元语言的发展，或者确实影响了元语言的发展。Gombert(1992)试探性地提出，陈述性知识(能够清晰地表达对写作的元语言理解)先于程序性知识(能够将元语言知识转化为写作)。本研究将通过考察陈述性元语言知识和程序性元语言知识之间的相互关系，以及元语言理解和写作成绩之间的相互关系来解决研究中的这些差距。其次，本研究将试图了解与所教写作相关的显性语法教学如何促进元语言理解，以及它是否支持元语言理解的产生，从而提高写作水平。这将包括探索语法元语言在增强或约束元语言知识方面的作用。从理论上讲，课程对语法教学的重视是建立在这样一种假设之上的，即显性教学有助于提高元语言理解能力，而这反过来又会通过提高写作成绩来实现。尽管关于语法在语言课程中的地位的争论旷日持久且争论不休(Locke 2010)，但这一因果轨迹从未得到有力的研究。在英格兰，自1989年《国家英语课程标准》颁布以来，语法理论上一直是《国家英语课程标准》的一部分，1998-2011年的《国家战略》特别强调写作语法。相比之下，澳大利亚刚刚推出了第一个国家课程，同时也侧重于语法。该竞标是由澳大利亚团队共同开发的，澳大利亚团队向ARC提交了与此平行的竞标，以资助澳大利亚元素。这里的建议旨在使智力和方法保持一致，既作为比较研究的一部分，也作为一个独立的国家项目，以减轻澳大利亚竞标失败的风险。

In the context of national and international concerns about standards in writing, both in school examinations and in the workplace, there is a pressing need for more informed understanding of the ways in which students become competent, autonomous writers. Many studies have emphasised the importance of metacognition and self-regulation in writing, signalling that writing is not simply about production, but also about choice and control. Metalinguistic understanding (knowledge about language) is one element of this control, yet we know surprisingly little about how this develops or how it supports writing development. Thus, this study seeks to investigate the relationship between metalinguistic understanding and development in writing; in other words, what metalinguistic understanding are students increasingly able to articulate and what are they increasingly able to demonstrate in their writing. In doing so, it brings together two complementary strands of research in writing. Firstly, it sets out to generate understanding of how young writers' metalinguistic understanding develops between the ages of 9 and 14. Existing research on metalinguistic understanding has not considered this in the context of older writers, focusing instead on early years' writing, on oral development, and on bilingual learners. Thus, we have no empirically evidenced understanding of trajectories of metalinguistic development in the middle years. At the same time, we have only limited understanding of the relationship between metalinguistic development and writing development. In general, there is an assumption that metalinguistic development precedes language performance, but in the context of writing, it is important to interrogate whether greater metalinguistic understanding leads to improved writing performance, or whether writing performance marches ahead of, or indeed shapes, metalinguistic development. Gombert (1992) suggests tentatively that declarative knowledge (being able to articulate metalinguistic understanding about writing) precedes procedural knowledge (being able to transfer metalinguistic knowledge into writing). This study will address these gaps in the research through examining the inter-relationship of declarative metalinguistic knowledge and procedural metalinguistic knowledge, and the inter-relationship of metalinguistic understanding and writing performance.Secondly, the study will seek to understand how the explicit teaching of grammar, relevant to the writing being taught, fosters metalinguistic understanding, and whether it supports the generation of metalinguistic understanding which leads to improvement in writing. This will include exploring the role of grammatical metalanguage in enhancing or constraining metalinguistic knowledge. Curricular emphases on teaching grammar are theoretically predicated upon an assumption that explicit teaching leads to increased metalinguistic understanding, which in turn is realized in improved writing performance. This causal trajectory has never been robustly researched, despite the prolonged and heavily contested debate about the place of grammar in the language curriculum (Locke 2010).The proposed study is a collaborative, comparative study involving England and Australia. In England, grammar has notionally been a part of the National Curriculum for English since its inception in 1989, with particular emphasis given to 'grammar for writing' in the National Strategies from 1998-2011. In contrast, Australia is just introducing its first National Curriculum, with a parallel focus on grammar. The bid has been developed jointly and a parallel bid to this submitted to the ARC by the Australian team to fund the Australian element. The proposal here has been designed to have intellectual and methodological coherence both as part of a comparative study or as an independent national project, to mitigate against the risk of the Australian bid being unsuccessful.