Metalinguistic Excercises as Classroom Activities

This book presents a series of exercises aimed at developing metalinguistic abilities applied to different types of texts. They address the two age levels of the metalinguistic tests involved in the MATEL Project (Metalinguistic Awareness Tests in European Languages - 543277-LLP-1-2013-1-IT-KA2-KA2MP), namely the MAT-2 (English acronym for Metalinguistic Ability Test n-2; 9-14 years), and the MAT-3 (English acronym for Metalinguistic Ability Test n-3; 16 years and beyond). Beyond differences in contents, these exercises share important commonalities in objectives and modalities. 1) The first objective is to sensitize teachers, pupils or students to the way concepts and questions are phrased as key to understanding what texts aim at conveying. 2) As a consequence, this type of training makes students practice a series of metalinguistic abilities, namely metasemantic, metagrammatical and metapragmatic, as the “royal road” to develop a reasoning method and study skills in general. 3) These exercises are practiced as classroom activities, i.e. as a form of intellectual training to which the whole classroom can contribute, under the guidance of teachers who address questions on critical points and lead the discussion afterwards. Each University involved as a Partner in the MATEL Project contributed to this book, which means that the four languages of the Partnership are all represented, namely Italian, Spanish, French and German.