What is "Metalanguage?"

When English language teachers (and other languages, too) talk about "metalanguage," they primarily mean the "language" used to talk about the target language. A simple example would be if I say "present perfect progressive sentence" to talk about the form and functions of a sentence like "I have been studying English since I was a child."

Using metalanguage is an easy way for teachers (and others) to talk about a language. It's not a great idea to use metalanguage to teach English language learners. It's better to go directly to the target language. For example, if I'm teaching the Simple Present, I would use and elicit the target language. I might ask, "What do you do every morning?" In this case, I am hoping to get something like, "I eat breakfast." I am using the Simple Present, rather than talking about the Simple Present.

I do use some metalanguage when I am teaching advanced ESL students. They usually know all the names of grammar parts, and so it saves a lot of time to use the shortcut of metalanguage.

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“What’s a Syllable?”

When I teach my adult ESL students the rules for adding a syllable to past tense verbs that end with a /t/ or /d/, I often use the word “syllable,” of course. I have found that about 50% of the time “syllable” is a new word, and sometimes a new concept, for my adult students.

Now I no longer make the mistake of assuming that students know the words (sometimes called the “metalanguage”) that I use to talk about the language. After all, ESL and EFL teachers should really use a minimum of metalanguage when teaching English. It’s just so much easier to take these shortcuts that sometimes I have to remind myself that my students are, after all, coming to me to learn to speak or communicate in English, not to learn to speak about English.

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"I am traffic accident"

Any English grammar problems here? There's a subject. There's a verb. We have the makings of a complete sentence. But there may be a problem or two. How about verb choice, verb tense and a missing article?

This is a sentence one of my beginning ESL students wrote for homework. I believe we were working on the past tense of "to be." (It was a couple of weeks ago, so I don't remember for sure.) OK. It was easy enough to correct the grammar problem of the tense used ("am" should be "was"), but that doesn't make the sentence correct either.

Here are possible grammatically correct sentences:

I was in a traffic accident.
I had a traffic accident.

Since this student was a beginner, it was easier (and I hope wiser) to show the correct options with just a little explanation.

Knowing how much to explain (the metalanguage) about a grammar point is often a fine line, or at least an invisible one. Too much explanation causes confusion and the student doesn't learn the point you are trying to make.

Working with advanced ESL learners allows us to use metalanguage to better explain the grammar points. When working with beginning level ESL students, it's often best to just provide correct examples.

I know that my learner finally understood the issues because of the great laugh we were able to have afterwards. She understood what her original sentence meant. And it is kind of funny.