Chelsea Garmon

CIL 601
October 27, 2015
Lightsey, G., & Frye, B. (n.d.). Teaching Metalinguistic Skills to Enhance Early Reading
Instruction. Reading Horizons, 45(1), 28-37. 2004
Teachers today are deeply concerned with the literacy development of low-income and
minority children (Snow, 1991). As teachers we strive to help our students become successful in
literacy. We need to help our student no matter what their background is. This article focuses on
the importance of a childs oral language development in particular metalinguistic skills.
Lightsey and Frye focus mainly on four broad categories phonological, word, syntactic, and
pragmatic awareness.
Syntactic
Syntactic awareness is the ability to think about the structure of language. This means
that students have an understanding of when words or phrases sound right or make sense.
For example if a student said We gots to got to music yesterday the correct way to say the
phrase would be We got to got to music yesterday.
Pragmatic Awareness
Pragmatic awareness is the purpose for which we use language. A good example of this is
when students provide evidence from the book to explain their answer. This strategy is best done
through read-alouds. The teacher should model throughout the reading and ask questions where
students can provide evidence from the story to answer.

Phonological and Word Awareness

Phonological and word awareness means when students use phonemes and words. This is
probably the most well-known. There are a significant amount of programs out across the
country to help teachers teach this form of metalinguistic skills. This is very important to a
primary teacher daily instruction.