This study sought to respond to calls for increased attention to syntactic instruction, including instruction that is responsive to students’ literacy needs and linguistic resources. Through a mixed-methods study, we sought to explore whether a syntactic intervention that focused on building students’ metalanguage and metatalk was effective in supporting syntactic knowledge. In this study, 49 sixth graders in an urban middle school in the western US were assigned to one of two conditions: a treatment condition receiving syntactic instruction (n = 25) or an alternate condition (n = 24). Although these results are exploratory, quantitative data analysis suggested that students in the treatment condition showed a deeper understanding of targeted syntactic constructions (i.e., appositive phrases) within connected text than students in the alternate condition (p = .04). In addition, qualitative analysis of interview data suggested that students in the treatment condition leveraged metalanguage and metatalk taught in the intervention to evaluate the function and purpose of syntactic features. While more research is needed, these results suggest the potential value of syntactic instruction in supporting students’ syntactic knowledge, including the value of leveraging metalanguage and metatalk specifically.
Knecht et al. (Wed,) studied this question.