Bilingue

International Journal of Applied Linguistics wSecondary
Vol. 16 wdiscourse
No. 1 w 2006
ability in L2 w 37
The development of secondary discourse

ability and metalinguistic awareness in
second language learners
Norbert Francis Northern Arizona University
Research on the development of language proficiency associated with academic

discourse and literacy learning is reviewed. Bilingualism and L2 learning are
considered as a point of reference to help formulate the following research
questions for future investigation: What are the components that together
make up literacy-related academic proficiency? Sequential bilingualism
provides for a useful perspective on this question because in L2 learning the
different components appear to develop at varying rates in relation to each
other, revealing imbalances that shed light on how aspects of language
knowledge and information processing might be represented and on how
they are deployed in actual language use. Which aspects of literacy-related
academic proficiency are not language-specific, and how do bilinguals access
requisite knowledge and processing components in L2 literacy learning?
Key words: academic language proficiency, secondary discourse, metalinguistic
awareness, bilingualism, literacy
El autor presenta una reseña de la investigación sobre el desarrollo de las

habilidades lingüísticas vinculadas con el discurso académico y la
alfabetización. Se toma como punto de referencia el bilingüismo y el
aprendizaje de segundas lenguas para proponer un marco conceptual para
futuras investigaciones: ¿cuáles son los componentes que, como conjunto,
conforman las habilidades de la lectura y la escritura en el ámbito académico?
El bilingüismo no-simultáneo ofrece una perspectiva provechosa sobre este
tema porque en el aprendizaje de segundas lenguas los diferentes componentes
muestran trayectorias de desarrollo menos homogéneas, revelando, a su vez,
desequilibrios que nos ayudan a apreciar cómo se representan los diferentes
aspectos del conocimiento del lenguage y del procesamiento de información
en la mente, y cómo se desplegan en el uso del lenguage. ¿Cuáles aspectos de
las habilidades académicas relacionadas con el alfabetismo no son específicos
a una lengua o la otra, y cómo puede el hablante bilingüe aprovechar del
conocimiento necesario y de los mecanismos de procesamiento disponibles
en el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura en una segunda lengua?
Términos clave: proficiencia lingüística académica, discurso secundario,
conciencia metalingüística, bilingüismo, alfabetización
© The Author
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
38 w Norbert Francis
Introduction
The description of different aspects of language ability associated with

schooling has been a long-standing preoccupation of educators, psychologists,
and linguists, especially with regard to language use that is related to
comprehension of classroom discourse and academic achievement. Learning
to read and write, and the use of reading and writing for academic purposes,
are central to school language development. Recent discussions by Cummins
(2000) of his model of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)
and by Colombi and Schleppegrell (2002) of the development of “advanced
literacy” have brought to the fore again some of the key dimensions of
analysis that language teachers and researchers will find useful. In particular,
clarity about the nature of academic language proficiency, its various aspects
and components, and how it develops in children will help resolve one of
the major challenges of multilingual and multicultural school systems: how
to provide the most favorable conditions for the unfolding of higher-order
academic literacy among those children for whom the language of instruction
is not one they understand or understand well. Ultimately, providing the
most effective and efficient second language instruction for child learners
will flow from a clearer and more systematic analysis of the nature of
academic language proficiency.
Two closely related assumptions underlie this discussion: (1) that a
distinction can in fact be drawn between advanced literacy-related language
proficiencies and other kinds of language ability – e.g. those required for
certain kinds of face-to-face conversation – that are not predictive of academic
achievement, and (2) that language proficiency, of all kinds and varieties,
can be decomposed. The study of CALP, for example, reveals component
structures that can be investigated: the way in which they are independent
of each another, and the nature of their corresponding interfaces and
interdependencies. A central theme in the discussion will be how ability in
one or another realm of language use in school is related to linguistic
competence.
This review of the research has as its aim a closer, more fine-grained
examination of these components. Child bilingual development will serve as
a backdrop to this discussion. In some ways, accounting for how two
languages interact with the different components of academic language
proficiency complicates the analysis; in other ways, it allows for a privileged
view of the same phenomena. In line with a componential approach to
studying literacy-related language use, we will begin with Cummins’ general
approach: that some of the relevant competencies and processing mechanisms
are independent of linguistic competence; i.e. in bilinguals there would be
one central foundation to CALP, not two separate language-specific academic
proficiency domains (CALP Language 1/CALP Language 2). Thus, as we
will see, all findings from the research on higher-order language abilities in
© The Author
Secondary discourse ability in L2 w 39
general (e.g. for monolinguals) apply to the development of these abilities in

bilingual children. At the same time, we will see how this first approximation
may need to be refined.
One starting point in this inquiry is the distinction between secondary
and primary discourse proposed by Gee (1996). Secondary discourse ability
develops from experience in language-learning contexts beyond those
associated with primary socialization in cultural and institutional contexts
that extend primary discourse ability. All preschool children exposed to
normal primary socialization acquire the prerequisites of secondary discourse
ability, and many are initiated into an extensive early apprenticeship that
forms the foundation for a strong and precocious surge forward in this
realm of discourse ability years before entry into primary school (Reeder
et al. 1996). With this kind of experience, children learn about an “orienta-
tion to meaning” that calls for a “verbal explicitness that is attuned to
presumptions of reciprocity of perspectives, and internal coherence” (Blum-
Kulka 2002: 113), one of the components of higher-order reading and writing
ability, but one that also underlies other kinds of academic discourse ability.
As Gee points out, literacy learning is mastery of one kind of secondary
discourse ability, in this case involving the written modality. The elevated,
formal, and aesthetic genres of “non-literate” cultures which have managed
to sustain a vital oral tradition perhaps offer the clearest examples of
secondary discourse that does not implicate the skills of reading and writing.
This elaboration reflects a growing consensus in the field today that broadly
qualifies the literacy–secondary discourse connection, prompting us to adopt
the cumbersome but more precise formulation: academic and literacy-related
language proficiency.
From this point of view, the primary–secondary discourse distinction
applies broadly, encompassing both written and oral modalities, as well as
literate and oral traditions (Francis 2001; Sulzby and Zecker 1991). ‘Primary’
entails universal access and uniform attainment; ‘secondary’ does not. For
example, secondary discourse ability, individually and collectively, could
fail to develop to advanced levels or even suffer erosion in situations of
sharp cultural dislocation (Gough and Bock 2001). In contrast, for normally
developing monolingual children, core linguistic knowledge and primary
discourse ability never erode, and they unfold uniformly according to
typical developmental milestones. In bilinguals, a first language (L1) may be
displaced by a second language (L2), but again, the capacity to construct (and
reconstruct) linguistic knowledge and basic communicative ability does
not erode.
Cummins (2000) points to the widely observed schooling outcome for L2
learners in which bilingual children may fail to attain adequate levels of
advanced literacy-related abilities, as revealed in below-average academic
performance in both the L1 and L2. While, on the one hand, representing an
unexceptional observation in many ways (corresponding, as it does, to
© The Author
deficient literacy learning by monolinguals), it highlights again the need to

maintain a separation in our developing conceptual model between ‘central’
cognitive domains of discourse ability and the respective linguistic
representations of the bilingual’s L1 and L2 grammars. But again, underlying
linguistic capacity, revealed through typical linguistic competence in either
the L1 or L2 or both, would not suffer an analogous deficiency or erosion.
That is, even under the most adverse circumstances of deficient instruction
and learning, and failed literacy–secondary discourse ability development,
core grammatical competence in the L1 and/or L2 is “sheltered”, vigorously
resisting external factors to which one might be tempted to ascribe
determinants of incomplete development or degradation. Only the most
egregiously impoverished (abnormal) primary socialization might negatively
bear upon the specifically linguistic (i.e. grammatical) domains (Francis and
Reyhner 2002). This is one way in which ability is related to linguistic
competence; we could say that the latter corresponds to (grammatical)
knowledge structures that form a component part of a given language
ability.1
All of the authors cited above agree on the importance of another aspect
of advanced literacy-related proficiency: the use of language as an analytic
tool of thinking, specifically the higher-order development of metalinguistic
awareness. Applying concepts from Lev Vygotsky and Basil Bernstein, we
can propose that this dimension stems from advanced conceptions in children
when they begin to systematize the relationship between language use
(meaning) and context, submitting these conceptions to greater and greater
degrees of awareness (Colombi and Schleppegrell 2002). With this growing
awareness of both function and form, children learn to attend to discourse in
progressively more abstract ways, confronting text and context in new ways
– what is commonly referred to as a more ‘decontextualized’ approach to
comprehension and expression (Cummins 2000; Olson 1990; Reeder et al.
1996).
Thus, the present review of the research will take the approach that an
initial examination of the components of academic language proficiency can
begin by identifying two broad categories: secondary discourse ability and
metalinguistic awareness. The next three sections will review the research
on the development of secondary discourse ability at three levels: discourse,
the sentence, and the word. The first level (the “highest”) focuses on the
development of narrative ability, and the second on the aspects of sentence
grammar that seem to accompany literacy and academic uses of language.
The third level (the “lowest”) examines the question of the importance of
word-level decoding abilities, in this case related to information-processing
skills that are strictly literacy-specific. For each level we examine how
metalinguistic awareness works to complete the formation of each kind of
ability. As it turns out, this “completion” is just the kind of developmental
process in which literacy and schooling can, and should perhaps, play a
leading role.
© The Author
The development of levels of narrative ability
In this section we will consider the proposal that narrative, including the
rudimentary pre-narrative subgenres that originate in conversational
recountings, forms part of the necessary foundation for all subsequent
development of independent non-interactive discourse ability. A strong and
complete development in this area would lay necessary groundwork for
school-based registers of the expository type. The idea is that early narrative
represents a kind of transitional ‘interdiscourse’ that bridges primary and
secondary discourse ability. Itself composed of a network of different kinds
of knowledge (an array of competencies), the ability to produce a coherent
narrative calls upon the meaning–grammar interface in “translating knowing
into telling” (Hudson and Shapiro 1991: 89). It does this in a way that goes
beyond typical situation-embedded conversational ability. For the reverse
process – comprehension – the listener translates a “telling”, in linguistic
form, into a “knowing” of the narrative kind. These advances in discourse
ability are reflected in new developments at the level of the sentence.
Beginning with the growth of more sophisticated conversational skills,
children apply previously acquired grammatical knowledge in new ways
(Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith 2001). For example, the use of pronouns
shifts more and more away from exophoric reference towards their use in
intratextual cohesion, later alternating with indefinite and definite full noun
phrases in a systematic way. The different components of early narrative
development are viewed here as acquisitions that help lead the child toward
mastery of the advanced discourse abilities to be learned in primary school.
Not surprisingly, certain key components of narrative ability form part of a
number of early childhood language assessment procedures; see Anderson
(2004).
Viewing early narrative as a bridge to secondary discourse ability, late
narrative rises above its predecessor in a number of ways. With the former
corresponding to an unqualified cognitive universal, late narrative (cf.
“schooled narrative”, Fang 2001) begins to differentiate and show greater
and greater variation among normally developing children. A number of
developments culminating during the period just prior to school entry
correspond to the transition. Astington (1990, 2002), for one, focuses on theory
of mind and metarepresentational ability. Young children (ages 2–3) already
understand human intentionality, can talk about internal mental states, and
form hypothetical and counterfactual models (e.g. in pretend play). However,
a new stage is inaugurated when children “represent the process of modeling”
and are able to “see that another’s belief is . . . his or her representation of
reality” (Astington 1990: 158). In experiments – e.g. appearance–reality
problems, and understanding how it is that dolls will act on the basis of
erroneous information – children around the age of 4 are successful, for
the first time, in attributing false beliefs to others and to themselves. At
about the same time, children become proficient in the interpretation of
© The Author
mental-state verbs that require subtle distinctions regarding presupposition,

e.g. related to factivity (Astington 1990: 162–6):
1) The shoemaker doesn’t know that the elves made the shoes. (factive)
2) The shoemaker doesn’t think that the elves came last night. (non-factive)
Olson (1994) and Lee, Torrance and Olson (2001) review related studies on
the development of the say/mean distinction. The emergence of ‘second
order metarepresentations’ is marked by first grasping the idea that belief
can be false and later by understanding interpretation, reflecting upon how
others, for example, think about mental states. In an experiment that depicts
Charlie Brown selecting the wrong color shoes because Lucy did not specify
that she wanted the red ones, when older children are asked “does Charlie
Brown think he is bringing the shoes Lucy wants”, they reply correctly.
Younger children, who still understand false belief only from their own
perspective, answer “no” (Olson 1994: 127–31). These culminating early
narrative acquisitions start to tip development toward the advanced story-
telling and story-understanding abilities that require the more active
participation of metalinguistic operations, a key ingredient in the transition
to late narrative. Episodically more complex stories are associated with the
confrontations between intentional action and obstacles, conflictual themes,
and characters’ interacting plans (Stein and Albro 1997). Experience with
these kinds of stories promotes higher levels of awareness of human
intentionality, internal contradiction, false belief, lack states, ambivalence,
and goals and plans that enter into conflict.
Concurrently, children advance in their ability to produce connected,
autonomous discourse, requiring an assessment of their interlocutor’s internal
mental state predictively, as opposed to only interactively. Greater
independence from conversational support accompanies the shift to themes
more and more removed from the immediate situational context (Ninio and
Snow 1996), particularly themes removed in time and space from any worldly
context or situation. In this regard, the concept of decontextualized discourse
is better understood as a recontextualization (Hickman 2003): What level of
specificity of shared knowledge can be assumed? In what way should an
explanation be explicit and complete? To what extent is the (hypothetical)
listener able to align his or her perspective with that of the narrator?
While it is important to distinguish between early and late narrative, no
sharp dichotomy seems to mark the passage from rudimentary ability to
more advanced ability in this domain. Defining features that characterize
the transition which future research could attend to might include: the use
of metalinguistic strategies, transcending dependence on situational context,
advanced inferencing and theory of mind representations, and the maturation
of information processing capabilities. A crude demarcation that could serve
as one possible starting point might be: for all normally developing children,
early narrative is universally attainable, while late narrative is not.
© The Author
As these more advanced productive abilities are applied to narratives of

greater complexity and independence from situational context support,
children’s receptive discourse abilities are put to the test on stories with
more elaborate episodic structures. The research on discourse comprehension
shows how the development of competencies associated with narrative,
specifically late narrative, lays the foundation for expository text abilities.
See, for example, the analysis in Shrubshall (1997) of certain features of
narrative that prepare children for essay text literacy: problem–solution text
patterns, non-sequential relationships and event sequences that need to be
integrated and unified under an overall theme, and the use of lexical and
grammatical means to signal cohesive ties. Again, it is useful to differentiate
between two types of narrative, the first more dependent on additive
relationships, prosody, and listeners’ ability to infer how story constituents
are connected, the second (associated more closely with essay text literacy)
exploiting a wider range of grammatical resources, such as subordination
and nominal complementation. It is the latter that “provides a gateway
into academic discourse and success in school literacy” (Shrubshall 1997:
404). The most relevant aspect of this work, for us, focuses on mature
comprehension strategies, the kind that readers engage in, for example, when
automatic, non-deliberative processing does not suffice to establish coherence.
How does the listener or the reader take “transient activations” and build
them into a structure, a “permanent memory representation” (van den Broek
1994: 580)?
This question is especially relevant to the problem of developing
advanced discourse abilities that are needed for complex narrative and
expository text. Here, comprehension involves operations on textual
constituents so that substructures can be built up and integrated in a steady
and orderly way. Gernsbacher’s Structure Building Framework begins
with the idea that general cognitive mechanisms, which are independent
of language, underlie comprehension (Gernsbacher and Foertch 1999).
These same mechanisms would therefore underlie discourse production
abilities as well; and for the bilingual they would underlie production and
comprehension in both the L1 and L2, following from the idea that there is
one central foundation to CALP. In comprehension, activations (from
discourse input) of memory nodes build developing mental structures. New
information can map onto the developing structure or activate a different set
of nodes, forming a new substructure. Skilled comprehension involves the
operation of suppression and enhancement mechanisms in such a way that
new substructures are not triggered unnecessarily (“shifting too often”). Less-
skilled comprehenders fail to establish coherence in large part because access
to previous structures is lost or degraded. In the next section we will see
how this kind of cyclical structure-building in discourse comprehension is
related to grammatical patterns that children encounter in academic texts,
especially when they venture beyond the familiar and highly predictable
patterns of standard narrative.
© The Author
Language development – grammar
Upon mastering the greater part of the phonological system of their native
language and acquiring an impressive beginning repertoire of basic
vocabulary by age 2 or 3, children rapidly build up a grammar sufficiently
approximating a mature steady-state so that by age 5 literacy instruction can
be initiated universally for all children. The emergence of a highly elaborate
working grammar is so rapid following the two-word stage that beginning
literacy learning has been documented well before the average age of entry
to kindergarten. For early bilinguals this applies either to one or both
of their languages. At the same time, however, we would hesitate to
characterize the young child’s grammatical abilities (i.e. knowledge +
processing capabilities) by first grade (6–7 year olds) as complete and
fully-formed in every way.
Taking as a provisional point of reference Universal Grammar (UG)
accounts of L1 acquisition (two L1s in the case of early, balanced bilingualism),
one approach to grappling with the problem of characterizing school-age
children’s knowledge of language and language ability is to appeal to a
distinction between core and peripheral grammar. The development of
morphology and syntax beyond the core may be governed at least in part
by learning mechanisms apart from UG and the Language Acquisition
Device; and some aspects of peripheral grammar might be open to indi-
vidual variation in a way that core grammar is not. Particularly in regard
to later stages of language development associated with literacy and
academic registers, certain structures may be mastered with the necessary
participation of metalinguistic strategies, again unlike L1 core grammar
(Foster-Cohen 1993; Herschensohn 2000: 27–53; Roberts 1994). Children
attain core grammatical competence in response to the “triggering experience”
provided by primary linguistic data, requiring no deliberate attention to
or analysis of language forms (Anderson and Lightfoot 2002: 18–40;
Meisel 1995). Other aspects of linguistic knowledge, associated with language
use in school and for advanced literacy, for example, would be attained
differently.
Clahsen and Muysken (1996: 722) offer what seems to be a general
approach to the problem of accounting for the development of different
kinds of linguistic knowledge, along similar lines to what is being proposed
here:
It is precisely the division of labour between UG- and non-UG learning

that is crucial to our understanding of the modular structure of language
development. It is implausible that all of L1 development is UG-driven,
since it is embedded in a highly intricate process of general cognitive
development, involving all kinds of learning. Knowledge of language
interacts in yet ill-understood ways with other knowledge-systems, many
of which have highly abstract computational properties.
© The Author
To date, research has barely scratched the surface of this proposed dif-
ferentiation within the linguistic subsystems. What independent criteria could
we apply in determining to which domain a given principle, structure, rule, or
pattern belongs? (For example, we would not be satisfied with just designating
everything that is universally and uniformly attainable by all normal children
as the “core”, even though this might be a good place to begin.) Are there
aspects of peripheral grammar2 that are attained universally, in a manner
analogous to their core counterparts (e.g. exploiting the participation of
a subset of general cognitive learning mechanisms that are universally
available)? Is there a domain of peripheral grammar that may be subject to
individual variation, outside and beyond what we would specify as typical,
fully-formed and complete native-speaker competence? If so, we would be
obliged to propose the participation of general cognitive learning mechanisms
that are not universally available to all children spontaneously and uniformly.
With regard to Foster-Cohen’s application of the concept of core and
periphery, the important question to address is: to what extent would late-
developing grammar, which provides evidence for non-core type variation
among children, be attributable to actual linguistic knowledge (competence)
or ability to deploy an early-acquired competence in different contexts of
use? How does the development of processing systems, working memory
capacity, and general cognitive development affect children’s ability to call
upon their linguistic competence? How these extra-linguistic factors interact
with grammatical competence is of primary interest to us because of our
focus on discourse and sentence comprehension. To what extent might a
child’s difficulty in comprehension be related to incomplete knowledge of
some aspect of his or her developing grammar, or to the above-mentioned
non-linguistic factors? A strong version of the “apply early-acquired principles
to new uses” hypothesis would indeed reject the suggestion made at the
beginning of this section: that some aspects of the knowledge of morphology
and syntax may be acquired late (after age 5). Comprehension failure related
to complex grammatical structures in first and second grade, for example,
would be due exclusively to processing difficulties, that is, to problems of
deployment of a complete and fully-formed grammar.
As a way to begin to delimit the question of grammatical competence or
usage, we would want to set aside for now problems of assigning an
interpretation to a sentence because of a lack of concept/vocabulary
knowledge, as in:
3) The marquis returned to settle his account with the cobbler.
or difficulties simply related to straining working memory resources in the

case of certain early developing recursive structures, as in:
4) The shoemaker lived in a village [by the river [near the castle [across
from a forest [on the side of a mountain]]]].
© The Author
5) The man [that the shoemaker’s sister thought [she would marry]] is telling
the truth.
In the case of examples (4) and (5), we could agree that the grammatical
knowledge itself involved in comprehending these sentences is clearly at the
disposal of the average 5-year-old and easily falls within the category of
early-developing and universally available linguistic competence. Com-
prehension failure in this instance, then, would be related strictly to
information-processing limitations.
However, a challenge for future research will be to explore the precise
nature of grammatical abilities in older school-age children: does new
competence develop in response to experience with academic literacy, or do
children learn how to use previously acquired knowledge in a new way? In
expository texts, clauses are constructed and linked differently from the way
they are in both interactive conversational dialogue and monologic narrative.
Nominalization, for example, is an important resource for establishing links
to prior text, a hallmark of academic discourse (Schleppegrell 2001). In
addition to dependence on prerequisite prior knowledge (something that
it might be claimed it shares with conversational discourse), this kind of
“informationally dense” text also requires a more retrospective and non-
linear kind of processing.3
Clearly, unlike the predictive and prospective comprehension strategies
typical of early narrative, these kinds of operation on discourse depend on
formal instruction and learning (Schleppegrell 2001; Schleppegrell and
Colombi 1997). Proficiency in understanding complex sentence patterns (e.g.
heavy noun phrases in subject position) depends on experience in the upper
grades with expository registers (especially after grade 2), and full mastery
of these patterns for comprehension would be facilitated by recourse to
reflective practice with well-formed examples. While we could assume broad
agreement on these points, the source of the difficulty that children face is
still open to debate. There is no doubt that children do in fact experience
comprehension difficulties with these kinds of grammatical patterns, for
example in reading, and that these difficulties can be remediated by direct
instruction. But are children acquiring new grammatical knowledge (i.e.
expanding their linguistic competence) or learning how to process more
effectively patterns they already know? One of the ways researchers have
framed this question is to contrast two proposals: the Structural Lag
Hypothesis and the Processing Limitation Hypothesis, more or less
corresponding to the two logical possibilities just mentioned – acquisition of
new grammatical knowledge vs. development of more advanced processing
capabilities.
In a series of experiments that assessed previously identified skilled and
unskilled readers, Bar-Shalom, Crain and Shankweiler (1993) explored this
question, comparing the findings to studies of grammatical knowledge of
young preschool children (Crain and Thornton 1998). Taking note of studies
© The Author
that show a correlation between reading ability and performance on syntax

assessments. The investigators focused on 7–8-year-olds’ ability to interpret
sentences that contain relative clause structures. If appropriate and sufficient
contextual support for interpretation is not given, for example, the unskilled
readers in fact perform at a level significantly inferior to their peers in
this kind of comprehension assessment. In this case, situational context
information would correspond to the restrictive function of relative clauses.
Consider examples (6) and (7) below. Unlike in (6), the existence of two men
would be presupposed in (7), only one of whom became wealthy with the
help of the elves. According to the researchers, not depicting both men in
the experimental workspace (e.g. in the form of puppets or toy figures)
leaves unmet, or unsatisfied, a presupposition that (7) normally requires.
6) The shoemaker, who never asked for the elves’ help, decided to repay
them. (non-restrictive relative clause)
7) The man that the elves helped became very wealthy. (restrictive relative
clause)
In contrast, if the pragmatic relations are made explicit by depicting all the
figures that might correspond to the presuppositions of a restricted relative
clause (in particular, the figures of two men here), then unskilled readers’
performance is comparable to that of skilled readers. Failure to provide
the correct contextual support forces the respondent to expend extra
computational resources to “accommodate an unmet presupposition” (Bar-
Shalom et al. 1993: 204). Thus, when unskilled readers’ working memory
capacity is strained, comprehension of complex sentence structures suffers
to a greater degree than that of skilled readers. On the other hand, if the
struggling reader is able to interpret and produce complex sentences under
more context-embedded conditions, his or her deficiency would not be the
result of a developmental lag in grammatical competence. These findings
would favor the Processing Limitation Hypothesis proposed by Bar Shalom
et al.
Of course, in the case of beginning or intermediate second language
learners, both incomplete grammatical knowledge of the L2 and processing
deficiencies may conspire to block interpretation of complex syntactic
patterns.4 This last observation, in turn, suggests the same possibility of
grammatical competence-related comprehension breakdown in children’s
primary language. Assuming that children are not born with knowledge of
language-specific grammatical structures and that these unfold maturationally
(and not instantaneously), for any particular construction there will be a
moment in development at which both immature grammatical knowledge
and immature processing capabilities contribute to comprehension difficulties.
There is no reason to exclude, a priori, the possibility that some of these
constructions may be late-developing, culminating during the period of
schooled literacy instruction. In any case, the kinds of investigation into
© The Author
child language development described above are surely on the right track in
their attempt to differentiate the components of sentence comprehension
that we can initially categorize along the traditional dimensions of competence
and performance (Newmeyer 2003). Given that literate and highly educated
adults experience the same kind of comprehension breakdown with complex
sentences even in their primary language (e.g. embedded clauses, see notes
3 and 4), processing limitation, to the categorical exclusion of any version of
a Structural Lag Hypothesis, must account for these cases. By extension, the
Processing Limitation Hypothesis cannot be excluded for children, either.
Many unanswered questions remain, with just as many pending a proper
formulation. One of the key concepts that will inform our analysis of findings
of future research is that of modularity. Assuming the relative autonomy of
the linguistic modules from general cognition, to what extent are they
encapsulated? Or, viewed from another angle, how and to what extent are
the general cognitive domains constrained in their interaction with the
linguistic modules, e.g. developmentally in the acquisition of grammar? In
broad terms, two alternative perspectives on modularity as it is related to
language acquisition could be considered: (1) that a significant interaction
among systems (particularly between general cognitive and grammatical
development) is the norm, and (2) grammatical knowledge is triggered in a
completely autonomous manner from general cognition; see Coltheart (1999).
It appears that Crain and Thornton, as well as Bar-Shalom et al., lean toward
the second perspective on modularity, offering a hypothesis that views the
processing of language input for acquisition as strongly bottom-up, with the
language faculty “sealed off” from the influence of general cognitive effects
and learning. The opposing view of how modularity might apply to both
language development and processing would consider the possibility of a
greater degree of interactivity, including top-down influences.
This consideration of the grammatical aspects of academic discourse ability
prompts us to return to the introduction of this discussion in which one
central cognitive domain was assumed for school-related proficiencies.
Bilinguals need not store, as the argument goes, a separate CALP for each
language; instead, the same central system is accessible, as necessary, for
academic, literacy-related tasks engaged in through the L1 or L2. However,
since part of academic language proficiency involves the mastery of the use
of language-specific grammar associated with academic texts, bilinguals may
develop separate representations, to some extent, for these domains for their
L1 and L2. As in all sentence and discourse comprehension, assigning an
interpretation to any potentially meaningful fragment of an academic text
calls upon the operation of specific interfaces that work the connections
between morphology/syntax and conceptual structures, plus the participation
of general-purpose interface processors. Research will need to focus on these
interface domains of language use in order to better understand how
bilinguals shift between languages when they learn how to use their L1 and
L2 in context-reduced, discourse ability-challenging academic language tasks.
© The Author
On the other hand, if it turns out that some aspects of academic-related

grammar ability correspond to actual late-developing competence (knowledge
of peripheral principles or structures, language-specific for the bilingual),
these would also be represented separately in L1 and L2 domains. They
would have developed with the participation of central-type, general cognitive
learning mechanisms. If correct, this should prompt us to consider another
kind of interaction between the linguistic domains and conceptual structures;
no neat encapsulation is likely here either. How linguistic competence
interfaces with the other components of language ability is still a very open
question.
Access to shared academic proficiencies in ‘biliteracy’
The present review of research was motivated by findings from our own
project of a consistently robust performance on school literacy tasks in
bilingual children’s vernacular language. The notable circumstance of this
seemingly favorable outcome was the nature of the instructional program:
while it granted symbolic recognition to the vernacular (Náhuatl), teaching
of reading and writing was limited, as is customary in this community, to
the national language (Spanish) (Francis 1997, 2000; Francis and Navarrete
Gómez 2000).
Although it did not figure among the objects of our study at the time, the
apparent facility with which the bilingual subjects engaged texts in their
“non-academic” language evokes recent findings from cross-linguistic
research on the importance of phonological processing abilities in skilled
reading. Geva and Wang (2001) review the evidence for underlying universal
principles which facilitate children’s deployment of requisite processing
strategies in second language and bilingual literacy learning. In the L2, the
rapid and automatized processing of orthographic–phonological correspond-
ences sustains skillful decoding and comprehension (Birch 2002), just as
it does in L1 reading (Adams 1990; Perfetti 1994). See Stanovich (2000),
Grabe and Stoller (2002) and Bernhardt (2005) for a survey of the relevant
psycholinguistic and pedagogical research. If word decoding continues to be
effortful and laborious for beginning and intermediate L2 learners, attention
resources cannot be allocated optimally to the higher-order, sentence-level
processes and to the construction of meaning (Saiegh-Haddad 2003; Stanovich
and Stanovich 1999). We should hasten to point out, however, that L2 readers’
phonological representation of words during decoding need not be native-
like or “complete” for the purpose of effecting fast and efficient processing
for meaning.
For bilingual readers, what appears to be most noteworthy is that there
are central processing mechanisms that operate upon the interfaces that link
the respective phonological structures and their orthographic representations.
These processing mechanisms appear to be in large part independent of the
© The Author
L1 and L2 and are especially productive in tasks that involve reading; they
seem to be accessed readily and applied to decoding in either language
when called upon. It also appears that the processing skills that are specific
to phonology–orthography mapping are special in some way. Other
subsystems (L1–L2 syntax and morphology) do not seem to be able to take
advantage of what researchers term ‘transfer’ as readily (Siegel 2002). For
example, not only do effective phonological processing and phonological
awareness abilities in each language correlate with each other, but these
abilities measured in either the L1 or L2 predict decoding skills in beginning
L2 reading (Geva and Wang 2001). Oller and Eilers (2002) make reference in
their large-scale study of bilingual literacy to what they term ‘phonological
translation’ abilities, suggesting similar cross-linguistic effects. On the other
hand, research has not found a similarly strong correlation between the L1
and L2 on measures of processing skill in the area of morphosyntax.
In our study of bilingual readers and writers, children were applying
phonological and orthographic processing skills learned through the medium
of the official academic language (Spanish) to an indigenous language
(Náhuatl) in which they were also proficient. The high levels of proficiency
in each language in this particular school-age population, and the fortuitous
circumstance of a very close match between the alphabetic systems of
the two languages, surely facilitated access to these processing skills.
Nevertheless, measured performance in literacy tasks in the “non-academic”
vernacular was surprisingly comparable to performance on equivalent tasks
in the official language of literacy instruction; see Francis (1997) and Francis
and Reyhner (2002) for findings and a discussion. A separate assessment of
children’s metaphonological awareness related to their knowledge of each
language (Francis 1998) provided indices that correlated positively with
literacy skills in each language, measured separately. In any case, the pattern
of results is consistent with the findings from L2 readers: some aspects or
subcomponents that form part of skilled, automatized decoding, applied to
the lower-level processes, appear to be learned once and are available
henceforth for application to decoding tasks in another language. We would
want to accept this principle at least in those cases in which the orthographies
in question are of the same type (e.g. alphabetic, Roman). Further research
still needs to explore the question of the threshold of general linguistic
competence in the L2: at what minimal level of overall L2 attainment does
the application of decoding skills (learned previously through an L1, or
taught directly through the medium of the L2) become productive?
The research on shared processing mechanisms, then, should in no way
deny language-specific or script-specific effects (e.g. in the transition from a
“shallow” orthography in L1 literacy to a “deep” orthography in L2 literacy).
Rickard Liow (1999) reports on the differing decoding strategies among
Chinese–English bilinguals/biscriptals depending on which language/script
was used for initial literacy instruction. Wang, Koda and Perfetti (2003), in
a study of Korean and Chinese English-language learners, showed how
© The Author
differences in students’ L1 orthography (alphabetic and morpho-syllabic, in

this case) impact on L2 decoding strategies. In this regard, examples of
“strategy transfer” (Rickard Liow 1999: 209) point to language-specific, script-
dependent factors that deserve further investigation (Bialystok 2002). For
example, in bilingual literacy-learning situations in which a new orthography
may be proposed for initial reading instruction in an indigenous language
with no available standardized orthography, how closely should the new
writing system adhere to the standard system of the national language (to
facilitate “strategy transfer”)? In any case, the evidence for the existence of
central processing mechanisms associated with the phonological system holds
out important implications for understanding how the components of
language in bilinguals interact. To reiterate, these processing mechanisms
are not completely language-bound; that is, they are not inextricably bound
to the specific phonological representations of either the L1 or L2.
The interesting pattern of findings regarding the components of reading
ability in bilinguals is the apparent dissociation in how the subsystems of
the two languages interact. While it may be easy to see why higher-order
discourse-organizing structures are relatively freely accessible to both the L1
and L2 (Pearson 2002) because they are clearly not language-specific, a
different picture emerges when considering the phonological and syntactic
systems. Why would the processing interfaces that serve phonological abilities
allow for more unfettered cross-linguistic access than appears to be the case
for syntax? Recall that skilled phonological processing in the L1 predicts
skilled decoding in the L2, while measures of performance related to L1
syntax have not provided evidence for the same kind of universal cross-
linguistic tendency (Pearson 2002; Siegel 2002). Why this should be the case
is not clear, but it is an important theoretical question to grapple with.
In bilingual literacy, not all language-related competencies, processing
mechanisms, and other necessary kinds of knowledge structure are accessed
and shared in the same way between the L1 and L2. This would follow from
modular approaches to analyzing reading ability as outlined by Perfetti (1994),
for example. Thus, questions of degree of autonomy, interdependence, and
language (and script) dependence need to be asked one at a time, component
by component, leading to the hardest question of all: how one relationship
of autonomy, interdependence, or dependence interacts with others. Consider
the evidence in favor of common underlying processors (cf. Cummins’
Common Underlying Proficiency) that facilitate decoding in beginning L2
readers, outpacing, so to speak, learners’ actual L2 phonological knowledge,
not to mention the development of the other linguistic subsystems. This was
taken as evidence in favor of its central and language-independent nature.
Another strong candidate for a reading ability that depends largely on central
and language-independent knowledge structures is text/discourse organizing.
We also should suspect that, in reading comprehension, the intervention
and integration of other components will have a bearing on how productive
L2 phonological processing will turn out to be. Some of these components
© The Author
are more or less autonomous (from the L1 and L2), while others will
be more highly language-dependent. For example, one working hypothesis
would predict that the ability to deploy a given lower-order phonological
processing skill or higher-order discourse-organizing skill (relatively
language-independent factors) in the L2 will be conditioned to some degree
by general L2 linguistic competence (relatively language-specific factors).
One useful approach to help frame the relevant research questions is the
application of Stanovich’s compensatory processing model to L2 reading
(Bernhardt 2005: 140). Specifically, knowledge sources that contribute to
proficient reading in a second language do not combine in a simple additive
manner but rather interactively.
On this point, in a recent review of the research on second language
literacy, Bialystok (2001: 152–81) reminds investigators that studies of
‘transfer’ and the ability to apply decoding strategies cannot bypass two
central factors: the reader’s level of linguistic competence in the L2, and the
level of literacy skills previously attained through an L1. Indeed, a
fundamental methodological defect of many studies of L2 literacy is the
failure to specify the first factor, often designating subjects simply and
indistinctively as e.g. “English as a Second Language”. Few L2 literacy
researchers today hold to early simplistic models of the “mother tongue
advantage” that mechanically prescribed a kind of natural order/stages
approach of L1 oral proficiency > L1 literacy (implying exclusion of L2 literacy
instruction) > L2 oral proficiency (possibly concurrent with the previous L1
literacy “stage”) > L2 literacy (upon “consolidation” of L1 literacy). However,
attempts to set aside the factor of L2 linguistic competence in the study of L2
reading will surely not prosper either. An important curriculum question in
bilingual teaching situations is: at what level of general L2 grammatical
competence can L2 literacy learning be undertaken productively? This has
far-reaching practical implications, e.g. in the case of children who speak a
vernacular language as their L1 and must become literate in an L2 of wider
communication, the official language of schooling, without unnecessary delay
during the elementary school grades. The research questions are actually
rather straightforward, but the relevant comparisons would necessarily have
to identify and separate out a number of child bilingual circumstances:
a) L2 literacy for mature L1 literates

b) L2 literacy for developing L1 literates
c) L2 literacy for young non-literate children
d) For all the above, the level of overall L2 grammatical competence that has
been achieved.
For example, a series of experiments might be conceived for initial literacy

learning in a non-primary language (c above): assessment of the rate of
literacy achievement in the L2 for subgroups of learners, beginning with
those comprised of subjects who posses no knowledge of the L2, compared
© The Author
to the rate of achievement of subgroups with progressively more advanced

initial levels of L2 competence. Short of such an ambitious research design,
findings that indicate diminished automaticity of processing even in advanced
L2 readers (Bialystok 2001: 178–9) offer an initial framework for formulating
the right questions. This is the kind of inquiry that would directly inform
language and literacy pedagogy. Conceivably, for young non-literate
beginning L2 learners, teaching approaches would vary depending on their
level of actual grammatical competence at the time of initial literacy
instruction.
One of the overarching questions in bilingual literacy that we have tried
to get a handle on in this section is: which aspects of reading and writing in
the L2 draw on a shared underlying system, and which aspects are specific
to the L1 and L2? The answers, however, are not likely to be the same across
the board (e.g. phonology and discourse are shared, syntax is L1/L2 specific).
Different levels or patterns of access to a shared underlying system will
depend on factors related, first and foremost, to overall linguistic competence
in the L2 and level of L1 literacy attainment.
Conclusion: linking secondary discourse ability and

metalinguistic awareness
We began with the proposal that the study of the components of academic
language proficiency could be divided, for analytic purposes, along two
dimensions: secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness. Each
of the sections that followed focused on a different level of secondary
discourse ability: the narrative/discourse level, grammar at the sentence
level, and the processing skills specific to reading at the phonological level.
To each of these correspond aspects of metalinguistic awareness that
complement them. Fully developed academic language proficiency (which
for us includes skilled reading comprehension) necessarily implies this
correlation, without exception. Another way of looking at this relationship
might be that secondary discourse ability and the competencies and skills
associated with it begin to develop independently of metalinguistic awareness,
attaining a rudimentary status, only developing toward higher, more advanced
stages with the concurrence of emerging metacognitive strategies that operate
upon the three levels of language use that we have examined.
To recapitulate, narrative emerges early from the first attempts by children
to structure experience, recount it or understand it, perhaps at first with
extensive interactive scaffolding from an adult interlocutor. Competencies
(knowledge structures) in the domain of discourse develop: the reorganization
of memory activations into coherent integrated representations, and the
acquisition of mental schemas of forms, in addition to the content schemas
of general world knowledge. Information-processing skills develop, augment-
ing the ability to analyze, integrate, categorize, infer, and conduct different
© The Author
logical operations applied to problem solving. Metalinguistic abilities advance

hand in hand with these competencies and processing skills. In practice, it
would be hard to draw a very fine line between emerging secondary discourse
ability and emerging metalinguistic awareness. Awareness of and attention
to discourse patterns, e.g. focussed reflection on how parts of stories go
together, becomes necessary when comprehension is challenged. For the
pragmatics of discourse comprehension and production, context is taken
into account strategically. Children learn to identify and use different kinds
of context, and learn to evaluate their relevance, suspending their effects if
necessary. Monitoring of comprehension, for example, becomes more
controlled and deliberate. In sum, as discourse processing becomes more
demanding, metacognitive operations directed at this level of language use
become more indispensable.
Turning our attention to the next level, grammar and sentence
comprehension, we contrasted two proposals: for complex syntactic
structures, typical of academic texts, the difficulties that children experience
can be traced to demands placed on working memory resources and
processing mechanisms (only), or traced to these same performance factors
plus incompletely attained, late-developing grammatical knowledge. In
either case, strategies that children learn, primarily through reflective
experience in parsing complex sentences in reading, have been shown to
provide significant improvements in decoding and comprehension. Applying
analogous monitoring strategies from discourse comprehension to the
sentence level, skilled readers self-correct and scan text in a non-linear fashion
to check for (among other things) well-formedness of complex syntax and
for semantic relationships that are to be expressed obligatorily. Controlled
or selective attention to different aspects of grammatical patterns develops
in response to reflection upon comprehension failure, ambiguity, etc.
The phonological level departs in at least one important way from the
previous two. Attainments at the discourse and sentence levels related to
advanced secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness are
applicable in a useful and practical way to both oral and written modalities
in comprehension and production. For phonology, the application is almost
exclusively to reading and writing, to graphemes. That is, the phonological
processing skills and the separate development of phonological awareness
are specific to literacy, and both can be the object of direct instruction. We
could also add here morphological word-analysis skills. For L2 learners, in
particular, sharpening their ability to direct attention to aspects of their
developing competencies (indirectly, by means of reflection on their
performance) is one way of boosting abilities in comprehension and
expression beyond their current stage of L2 mastery. And the development
of this kind of language awareness appears to be especially amenable to the
effects of properly designed focus-on-form instruction.
Now consider how the secondary discourse ability counterparts in the
primary discourse ability domains fit into the picture. Beginning again at the
© The Author
top, we recall that late narrative and advanced expository discourse abilities
are supported by development in metalinguistic awareness, and vice versa.
In contrast, basic conversational ability and early narrative, while they may
provide some contexts for early metalinguistic awareness development and
may involve the beginnings of reflection and awareness of language forms,
would not depend on it in the fully reciprocal way that has been proposed
for the secondary domains. In the case of L1 core grammar competence and
L1 phonological knowledge, the separation is more clear-cut, setting aside,
for now, L2 learning regarding these questions (cf. Segalowitz 1997).
Awareness and attention to morphological and syntactic patterns appear to
help children process complex sentences that they encounter in academic-
type discourse and help them improve their writing abilities. On the other
hand, acquisition of core grammatical competence, as evidenced in primary
discourse tasks, unfolds autonomously from the higher-order metacognitive
domains. Similarly, children’s L1 phonological knowledge attains com-
pleteness through simple exposure to positive evidence. Metaphonological
abilities and discrete processing skills that require manipulations of isolated
phonemes may contribute to developing abilities related to the performance
of specialized oral genres, but non-literate children and adults would normally
have no use for them (ludic functions aside). They are truly literacy-specific.
There is a noteworthy consensus in the work on metalinguistic abilities
(Brockmeier 2000; Gee 2001; Olson 1996), cutting across theoretical models
of language development, that these abilities are most profitably studied as
they intervene in the learning of academic-type, literacy-related proficiencies.
Some of the proposals in this conclusion, for which the evidence is still
tentative and which should be taken as hypotheses for further research,
have a special relevance for studies of child bilingualism because they raise
questions of how knowledge and skills are accessed by the L1 and L2 and
which components of these competencies and skills might be shared. For L2
educators, an account of which knowledge structures and processing skills
are not language-bound and which are more language-specific will contribute
to the important task of designing more efficient language teaching programs,
so that learners’ existing competencies and abilities can be put to use more
effectively.
Notes
1. In this discussion, ‘ability’ refers to skill in using language for a specific purpose,
in all senses synonymous with ‘proficiency’. While knowledge, or competence,
might be revealed indirectly in some aspect of a language user’s ability, ability
itself can be gauged directly by performance on a specific set of tasks. A given
language ability would be composed of a network of competencies (different
kinds of knowledge structure), plus the special information-processing mechanisms
that are required for putting the relevant linguistic competencies to use.
© The Author
2. A reviewer called attention to the terms ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ in reference to how
they are typically understood among UG-oriented researchers, suggesting that
they are being used here in a non-technical sense. This is correct. If ‘core grammar’
is taken as referring to the invariant properties of language determined by
UG, and the ‘periphery’ to the ‘local’ idiosyncrasies that account for variation
among dialects and languages, then a different idea is being pursued in this
discussion. More or less, ‘core’ would be the primary or substantive child grammar
“guaranteed” developmentally by simple exposure to primary linguistic data, an
invariant UG-core in a developmental sense. Peripheral grammar would emerge
with the necessary participation of general learning mechanisms, in a different
way from automatic and spontaneous parameter-setting. The idea comes from
Foster-Cohen’s (1990: 166) discussion of the role of the Language Acquisition
Device in child development:
[It] is important to reiterate that research into UG only concerns certain parts
of the grammar. UG is claimed to embody information that will allow the
child to formulate the core grammar of the language. The remainder of the
grammar – the peripheral grammar – as well as the pragmatic rules for language
use, involve a variety of different underpinnings – some linguistic innate
knowledge, and some information from the input.
An alternative to using the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in the developmental

sense would be ‘early-developing’ and ‘late-developing’, the latter implying non-
UG learning along the lines suggested by Clahsen and Muysken (1996).
3. Chafe (1985) catalogues the grammatical devices that writing in particular
places at the service of expository discourse for the purpose of expanding the
size and complexity of “idea units”. Academic writing calls on students to
apply their grammatical knowledge with an eye not only on well-formed
sentences but also on how they contribute to the construction of coherent texts
of a new kind (Celce-Murcia 2002), which are different from narrative and
conversation.
4. Jacobs (1995) explains why different kinds of dependent clause pose different
kinds of comprehension difficulty, especially for L2 learners. Subordinate clauses
generally present fewer problems than embedded clauses. In the first case the
dependent clause functions as an adjunct and is often introduced by semantic
markers that serve as useful signposts for discourse organization. The embedded
dependent clause, as an argument of a predicate, requires the listener/reader to
sort out which arguments go with which predicates.
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[Final version received 12/7/05]

Norbert Francis
College of Education
Northern Arizona University
P.O. Box 5774
Flagstaff, Arizona 86011
USA
e-mail: norbert.francis@nau.edu
© The Author

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International Journal of Applied Linguistics wSecondary

The development of secondary discourse

Research on the development of language proficiency associated with academic

El autor presenta una reseña de la investigación sobre el desarrollo de las

The description of different aspects of language ability associated with

general (e.g. for monolinguals) apply to the development of these abilities in

deficient literacy learning by monolinguals), it highlights again the need to

The development of levels of narrative ability

mental-state verbs that require subtle distinctions regarding presupposition,

As these more advanced productive abilities are applied to narratives of

Language development – grammar

It is precisely the division of labour between UG- and non-UG learning

3) The marquis returned to settle his account with the cobbler.

or difficulties simply related to straining working memory resources in the

that show a correlation between reading ability and performance on syntax

On the other hand, if it turns out that some aspects of academic-related

Access to shared academic proficiencies in ‘biliteracy’

differences in students’ L1 orthography (alphabetic and morpho-syllabic, in

a) L2 literacy for mature L1 literates

For example, a series of experiments might be conceived for initial literacy

to the rate of achievement of subgroups with progressively more advanced

Conclusion: linking secondary discourse ability and

logical operations applied to problem solving. Metalinguistic abilities advance

An alternative to using the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in the developmental

Anderson, S. and D. Lightfoot (2002) The language organ: linguistics as cognitive

Francis, N. (1997) Malintzin: bilingüismo y alfabetización en la Sierra de Tlaxcala. Quito:

[Final version received 12/7/05]

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