The competence to consciously control and utilize a better understanding of language organization helps the language users produce grammatically correct sentences and comprehend a syntactic aspect in a formal language structure, which helps the student learn, use, and understand the language fluently. Metasyntactic ability involves a mental process to reflect and manipulate the syntactic aspect of language consciously. In contrast, French grammar learning is still problematic among most Indonesian students. This study aims to gather initial data concerning the Indonesian French learner's metasyntactic ability, which is crucial to support French teachers and researchers in effectively creating innovation to develop foreign language education. The present study attempts to measure the learning results of the French students and their metasyntactic ability to French grammar competence. A cross-sectional study carried out twelve students (from various levels of proficiency) are given metasyntactic, replication of incorrect sentences, syntactic preferences, and word order tasks. Ultimately, the two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) results showed that metasyntactic ability (MSA) is not varied among students. On the other hand, as a group, they showed a significant difference in MSA based on their language proficiency levels but held insignificant differences for their grammatical preferences. The findings from multiple regressions also revealed that syntactic ability accounted for students' MSA and correlated with their grammatical preferences. This fact explains that each variable's aspect, including MSA, is not always varied regarding language proficiency.