When students tackle grammatical problems: Exploring linguistic reasoning with linguistic metaconcepts in L1 grammar education

Investigating Dutch teachers’ beliefs on working with linguistic metaconcepts to improve students' L1 grammatical understanding

“…Not only did these students' ability to tackle unknown grammatical problems increase, so did the amount of metaconcepts they turned to when tackling these grammatical problems (d = 0.70). In the same study, it was found that using both explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar are good predictors of linguistic reasoning quality, especially when combined (Van Rijt et al 2019b). An important added benefit of the intervention described in The Van Rijt et al (2019b) is that students' tendency to tackle grammatical problems using rules of thumb diminished significantly (d = 0.42).…”

“…In the same study, it was found that using both explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar are good predictors of linguistic reasoning quality, especially when combined (Van Rijt et al 2019b). An important added benefit of the intervention described in The Van Rijt et al (2019b) is that students' tendency to tackle grammatical problems using rules of thumb diminished significantly (d = 0.42). This is a welcome side effect, since traditional grammar teaching is often criticised for its application of shallow rules of thumb as a dominant reasoning strategy (Coppen 2009;Van Rijt and Coppen 2017;Berry 2015).…”

“…When used this way, linguistic metaconcepts can mediate students' understanding of more traditional concepts. It has been shown that relating traditional grammatical concepts to underlying linguistic metaconcepts could benefit students' grammatical understanding, language awareness and linguistic reasoning ability (Van Rijt, Wijnands, and Coppen 2020;Van Rijt et al 2019b).…”

“…For grammar education, two recent intervention studies have demonstrated the merits of a metaconceptual approach. The first was an intervention study showing that first-year university students' grammatical understanding and reasoning ability significantly improved (d = 0.62) after participating in an intervention in which metaconcepts were related to traditional concepts (Van Rijt et al 2019b). Not only did these students' ability to tackle unknown grammatical problems increase, so did the amount of metaconcepts they turned to when tackling these grammatical problems (d = 0.70).…”

“…Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Less research has focused on learning grammar per se, meant to increase students' language awareness or improve their ability to think about and reflect on the grammatical structure, meaning and context of language as an object of study Van Rijt et al 2019b;Boivin et al 2018;Fontich and Garciá-Folgado 2018;Ribas, Fontich, and Guasch 2014). Whereas improving students' language awareness or linguistic reasoning skills may enhance literacy development when properly integrated with writing education (Van Rijt, De Swart, and Coppen 2019), stimulating these aspects can also be considered a valuable goal in itself (Hulshof 2013;Myhill 2016, 39;Ribas, Fontich, and Guasch 2014).…”