Metalinguistic awareness and academic achievement in a linguistically diverse school setting: a study of lower secondary pupils in Denmark

Abstract

This study focuses on metalinguistic awareness (MLA) and its relation to academic achievement for mono-, bi- and multilingual adolescents in Denmark. While MLA is one of several cognitive measures positively related to bilingualism and bilingualism is associated with academic advantages, Danish bi-/multilingual pupils appear not to benefit from their knowledge of more languages as they lag behind their monolingual school peers. Therefore, this study aims to depict the distribution of MLA between different linguistic groups in a Danish school context and to determine whether there is a correlation between MLA and academic achievement. Additionally, the relationship between socioeconomic status and test results is investigated. Participants are categorised according to the languages they report using actively. 219 pupils aged 14–16, 106 monolingual and 113 bi-/multilingual, completed a questionnaire and a test of MLA, both in Danish. School leaving exam results and a measure of socioeconomic status were also obtained. While results show no distinct bi-/multilingual advantage on the test of MLA, a strong correlation between school leaving exam results and MLA is found. Furthermore, Danish proficiency and socioeconomic status accounts for some of the variation in test results, thus moderating test performance differences found between groups.

Keywords:

• metalinguistic awareness
• multilingualism
• bilingualism
• academic achievement
• socioeconomic status
• Denmark

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all pupils, teachers and schools who participated in the pilot studies and the main study for making this research possible as well as the Municipality of Copenhagen for providing final exam grades for participants in the main study. Furthermore, I am grateful for the ongoing support of my supervisor and the constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bilingual pupils in the Danish school system are defined as children who have a mother tongue other than Danish and who do not learn Danish until they come into contact with the surrounding community or through the teaching in school (UNI-C Statistics & Analysis, 2008).

2. The test exists in Italian, English, Spanish and French and will be translated into German as part of the European research project Metalinguistic Awareness Tests in European Languages (MATEL), which aims to validate the test on nationwide samples in the mentioned languages and to develop metalinguistic teaching materials for language teachers (MATEL, 2014).