Metalinguistic awareness in Spanish partial immersion and English-only elementary students

This study compares metalinguistic awareness of students in a one-way partial Spanish immersion (IMM) program to that of their English-only (ENG) counterparts at the same school. Students in grades 3 and 5 from each program completed a sentence grammaticality judgment task in English delivered orally. Measures of IMM students’ Spanish proficiency were included to examine the relationship between L2 Spanish ability and metalinguistic awareness. Grade 5 IMM students outperformed ENG students on the grammatically anomalous sentences, but no difference was found at grade 3. For the semantically anomalous sentences, IMM students outperformed their ENG counterparts at grade 3, but the reverse was true for grade 5. In summary, IMM studentś performance on the anomalous sentence tasks did not show a robust bilingual advantage when compared to their ENG students at the same school, nor did there appear to be a strong relationship between L2 Spanish proficiency level and metalinguistic awareness.