This paper reports data of a study that investigated the role of schooling in metasyntactic awareness development. Fifty-four children drawn from first and second grade from private and state schools participated in the study. They were given three syntactic awareness tasks: judgement of correct and incorrect sentences and correction. There were no grade-effect but a significant school effect. Children from private schools performed better than from public schools. Correlations between syntactic awareness and literacy measures showed that the better children were at syntactic awareness the better they were at literacy measures. The results suggest that children's environmental experience have a role to play in the development of syntactic awareness.
literacy; syntactic awareness development; metalinguist development
