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The required understanding is not about any specific language, but about language in general. It involves children’s conscious reflection on and manipulation of the properties of language.

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Impact on Language and Literacy Learning 

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Impact on Language and Literacy Learning 

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Metalinguistic awareness in a child's original, dominant language serves as a strong, foundational base that can be transferred to toward the acquisition of a second language; powerful in language and literacy learning.

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Linguistic Distance and Metalinguistic Awareness

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Linguistic Distance and Metalinguistic Awareness

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Distance is an important factor in regards to a student's metalinguistic awareness, and thus language acquiring abilities. For example, some languages are very similar in their word structure (English and Spanish share several cognates). This being said, it makes logical sense to assume that a student's "lexical knowledge" in their first language can be transferred to their second language.

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Bilingual children have stronger metalinguistic awareness that can assist them in learning to read. Studies document that bilingualism boosts children’s metalinguistic awareness (phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc.) with different aspects of reading (e.g., decoding, word reading, word knowledge, and comprehension). These benefits exist across different pairs of alphabetic languages (e.g., Spanish-English, Korean-English) and orthographically contrasting languages (such as Chinese-English).