What do children know and need to know about written ianguage before and as they learn to read? Answers to this question were undertaken by a variety of researchers in the field of emergent literacy and beginning reading in the book Metalinguistic Awareness and Begbming Literacy: Conceptualizing What It Means to Read and Write (Heinemann, 1986), edited by David B. Yaden, Jr. and Shane Templeton.
The editors define metalinguistic awareness as "young children's emerging and Unique conceptualizations of the processes and elements involved in learning to read and write" (p. xiii). Thus, the articles in this book go beyond the older, more narrow definition of the term which dealt with children's understanding (or lack of understanding) of the terms of instruction, such as letter, syllable, word, and so forth. The editors point out that the different studies represented in the book share the underlying concept that "young children as a group embarking on the path to literacy exhibit slowly evolving and widely divergent notions of the tasks expected of them before acquiring a conventional understanding of what it means to read and write" (p. xiii).
Skillful editing and editorial decisions are reflected in the organization of the volume. Following a fascinating account by Yaden and Templeton of the etymology of the term metalinguistic awareness, the first set of articles provides an overall view of reading research in metalinguistic awareness. This section con S tains articles by Downing ("Cognitive Clarity: A Unifying and Cross-Cultural Theory for Language Awareness Phenomena in Reading"), Johns ("Students' Perceptions of Reading: Thirty Years of Inquiry"), and Yaden ("Reading Research in Metalinguistic Awareness: A Classification of Findings According to Focus and Methodology"). The following sections reflect attempts to categorize the work in this field into theroetical and methodological subtypes.