Among the metalinguistic abilities three seem to help children to learn to read and to write: phonological awareness, syntactic awareness and morphological awareness. Of the three abilities, the least studied one is morphological awareness. However, this state of things is changing and a new body of knowledge has been formed about the role of morphological abilities in literacy. As this field of research advances, new theoretical and methodological questions are raised. Based on recent published literature in this field, this article discusses some of these questions.
Metalinguistic awareness; morphological awareness; literacy