Although the title speaks of play and then metalinguistic awareness, I am going to talk about them in the reverse order-first, explain what I mean by 'metalinguistic awareness' as a special dimension of language experience and its seeming importance in education; then describe one, and only one, conception of the function of 'play' in general and play with language in particular; and finally ask how we might encourage play with language in school.
Metalinguistic AwarenessIt is intuitively obvious to us as language users that when either speaking or listening, our focal attention is not on speech sounds, nor even on larger units such as words and syntactic patterns. Our focal attention is on the meaning, the intention, of what we or someone else is trying to say. The language forms are themselves transparent; we hear through them to the meaning intended. As the Duchess rightly says in Alice in Wonderland, 'and the moral of that is-take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.'In both speaking and hearing, complicated coordinations of phonetic, semantic and syntactic processing are run off smoothly, resulting in the articulation of an idea into a sequential stream of sounds by the speaker, and the perceptual processing of such a temporal stream of sounds into an interpretation of an idea by the hearer. While we do not understand how human beings do this re-
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