Well, I have 'in hand' a response to the question about meta-language from
John Polias, a (quite successful) teacher-educator in Australia who uses
Systemic Functional Grammar. I'm afraid that the terminology of SFG may get
in the way of the intended message about kids picking up meta-language, so
please keep in mind the purpose for posting the ANECDOTAL evidence below. I
have also been referred HARD(er) evidence in a recent book:

     Unsworth, L. (Ed.). (2000).  Researching language in schools and
        communities: Functional linguistic perspectives. London:
        (Continuum)Cassell.

in a chapter authored by Geoff Williams, "Children's literature, children
and uses of language
description pp. 111-129"

Geoff's work is fabulous IMHO. I have in mind a previous article of his
reporting on a study of sixth graders using "theme/rheme" to become quite
attentive to and sophisticated in the way they transition sentences in a text.

Here's the ANECDOTAL evidence -- oh, but first, let me add my own bit of
anecdotal evidence from a video of SFG-based teaching that I saw, some of
which I objected to, but other chunks impressed me and everyone else who has
viewed them. One in particular was a class of 4th grade students who were
preparing for a project interviewing aged(?) people in a home for elders.
The teacher had introduced the term "modality" and the students could refer
to "high" and "low" modality in the questions they prepared. So anyway:

>Just a quick note because it's fresh. From anecdotal evidence, I can't say
>much about picking it up at a faster rate but I can say that school students
>at any age have no trouble in learning the metalanguage. Today, I had a
>quick look (a couple of minutes only) at a video of 10 year old new arrival
>students (had been in Australia only a few months) where they were using the
>transitivity labels with no problems at all. The bit that ilooked at was
>part of a lonfger video that the school shows to prospective parents. The
>school has a special program for newly arrived ESL students as well as
>classes for children who speak English as their first language.
>
>Anyway, the little I saw on the video was something like:
>
>The teacher wrote "The big, bright moon shone like a light." The
>metalanguage that was used by the teacher and students at various stages in
>the lesson(s) were Participant, Process and Circumstance and the nominal
>group labels of Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier and Thing. The
>students were able to say what the functional groups were in the example
>above and labelled the groups correctly, even the Circumstance (not sure
>whether they got to of Manner: comparison but they did label it a "how"
>Circumstance) and identified Process and Participant and then further
>analysed at group level to get the Epithets etc.
>
>The whole school is using the functional metalanguage (decision made by the
>teachers and principal etc), which means this is happening with 5-6 year old
>new arrival students too. The teacher with the 5-6 year olds didn't think
>she was doing anything remarkable: you can see how unmarked the metalanguage
>is for her.
>
>BTW we're also doing work with teachers on reflecting on behaviour as
>linguistic choices in context (rather than solely pysochologically) and the
>interest from teachers etc is enormous (we're getting teachers and students
>to understand tenor and the linguistic choices available). We're also
>getting interest from teachers of the hearing impaired (teachers who are
>deaf themselves or are teaching the deaf).
>


Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183