Correlational Study Of Metalinguisic Awareness And Chinese EFL Learners' Writing Performance

In the field of second language acquisition,the role of metalinguistic awareness(MLA)has not aroused adequate concern of researchers.Existing research on language acquisition has focused more on language proficiency and bilingual learners.Research on MLA and its relationship with writing performance is currently insufficient.The present study is intended to find out the characteristic of Chinese EFL learners' MLA and the correlation between their MLA and writing performance under the context of foreign language teaching in China,trying to provide pedagogic implications for teacher talk and task designing.Therefore,two research questions were presented: What is the characteristic of Chinese EFL learners' MLA? And what is the relationship between MLA and quality of learners' writing? To answer these questions,this paper takes the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.Fifty-three Chinese non-English majors were invited to take part in the research.MLA was measured through Grammaticality Judgment,Language Analysis,Error Correction and Rule Explanation.The Grammaticality Judgment test required subjects to judge correctness of sentences.In Language Analysis subjects were required to identify the same parts of speech in 12 sentences.In Error Correction and Rule Explanation,the subjects were required to correct the error in each sentence and to explain the grammatical rules that had been broken.From the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data,we can find that Chinese EFL learners' MLA is strongly correlated with their writing performance.The subjects possessed limited metalanguage and the level of MLA is subject to individual variability.