Since the 1970s, there is an increasing interest in the investigation of children's metalinguistic development and the role played by metalinguistic abilities to reading and writing. Among such abilities, one can name the syntactic awareness. The present study aims to carry out a methodological literature review on syntactic awareness in order to describe the tasks used to measure it and to discuss the validity and the appropriateness of such instruments to the research on the development of metasyntactic abilities in children. In the present analysis, we discuss the efficacy of the classical syntactic awareness tasks (judgment, correction, repetition and localization) as well as tasks of recent use in literature (analogy and replication tasks) in effectively access children's intentional manipulation of their syntactic knowledge.
syntactic awareness; metalinguistic development; syntactic awareness tasks