Why should we teach pupils terms for aspects of language use – a ‘metalanguage’, as it is sometimes called? For example, why does the teacher suggest that the pupil ‘use the past tense’, rather than saying ‘Write "ed" there and there, and "shook", not "shake", there’? The answer seems to be that the terms help the learner to generalise from that activity to all similar ones and thus have a specific way of thinking about such activities in future. This process also, presumably, serves to crystallise the learner’s knowledge about how this aspect of language operates, by making it specific and conscious, especially if similar instances are regularly identified and described in the same way, in similar contexts.
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