Discovering features of language: metalinguisitc awareness of adult illiterates

Abstract

"What do illiterate adults know about writing and language? Can they recognize environmental print? How do they think about the representational nature of writing? How would they judge word length? Do they know where in a spoken sentence one word ends and the next begins or that the word cat is made up of three speech sounds? Those questions arose after we had been researching the acquisition of reading and writing in a second language of adult illiterates and had been observing the students for about a year (Kurvers & Van der Zouw, 1990). Many observations seemed to suggest that the concepts on language and literacy teachers brought to the classroom often did not match with what the illiterates were thinking. In answering questions about a story they just had been reading, the beginning readers often used their own experience, and not the text. In copying written words, they seemed to use incidental features instead of the distinctive features the teachers were looking at. And in talking about language, words like ‘empty’ or ‘hole’ confused them, because they could not understand how something could be a word, “when there is nothing”"