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In:TBLT for Young Learners: Challenges, opportunities and goals
Edited by Sima Khezrlou
[Task-Based Language Teaching 21] 2026
► pp. 130–154

Chapter 7
Young learners’ metalinguistic awareness in a task-supported EFL teaching intervention

 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
 | King’s College London
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This study explores the extent to which metalinguistic awareness of the past tense develops among YLs after a task-supported peer interaction intervention, with and without explicit form-focused and/or interactional pre-task instruction. Four groups of 6th-grade EFL learners aged 11–12 participated in an 8-week pedagogical intervention, while a fifth control group only participated in the testing sessions. The data come from an error identification and correction task which was administered pre and post intervention. Results show that the two groups which received explicit form-focused pre-task instruction produced more relevant correction attempts at post-test than the task-only, interaction strategy, and control groups. However, only the group with both metalinguistic and interactional pre-task instruction produced significantly more accurate corrections.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Metalinguistic awareness
    • Young learners’ metalinguistic awareness
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Intervention
    • Error identification and correction task
    • Procedure
    • Data analysis
  • Results
    • The effect of time and intervention on attempts to correct
    • The effect of time and intervention on relevant and accurate corrections
    • The learning process: Inaccurate corrections
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
  • Suggestions for further reading
  • Appendix
References (54)
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Suggestions for further reading
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