Traditional psycholinguistic approaches to metalinguistic awareness in L1 learners elicit responses containing metalanguage that demonstrates metalinguistic awareness of predetermined aspects of language knowledge. This paper, which takes a more ethnographic approach, demonstrates how pupils are able to engage their own focus of metalanguage when…

Argues that awareness of the relationship between language and the sociocultural context in which it occurs is important for students and teachers. The article suggests that everyday, ephemeral texts can be easily collected and categorized according to genre for teaching and cross-cultural comparison. (19 references) (Author/CK)