Metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension: Different facets of a complex relationship

This paper discusses the complex relationship between metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension, based on phonological, morphological and metatextual awareness. Although it has been based on researches with children, this paper has a theoretical focus. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to reflect on the sounds that form words, supporting the decoding process, which in turn contributes to reading comprehension. Morphological awareness is understood as the ability to reflect on the morphemes of a language, which are the smallest linguistic units that possess meaning. We observe that the information related to decoding interacts with syntactic-semantic information, which stems from the knowledge the reader has about the morphology of the language, contributing to the reading of texts. Metatextual awareness refers to the ability to reflect on texts 'properties. Different from phonological and morphological awareness, the relationship between metatextual awareness and reading comprehension are not so clear, and there are diverging results as to the contribution of knowing of a text's properties to the understanding of that text. The understanding of these relations allows us to build a theoretical framework about the role of metalinguistic awareness, whether in relation to the phoneme, the morpheme, or the properties of the text, in reading comprehension, as well as derive from this framework educational implications about the process of learning how to read.