Written metalinguistic reflections of 4th graders on scientific explanations: A bridge between conceptual, discursive, and lexicogrammatical dimensions

Writing disciplinary texts is difficult for upper-elementary students, but it is a core practice for subject learning. A dimension under-explored in disciplinary writing contexts is metalinguistic reflection; however, this could help students attend to the different dimensions of writing, building bridges between them. This study characterizes the metalinguistic reflections of 96 monolingual Spanish-speaking 4th graders on the school scientific explanations genre throughout a pedagogical intervention. It also explores relations between metalinguistic reflections and scientific explanations written by two students. The results showed that the students’ reflections changed throughout the learning sequence, since at the beginning, they mainly focused on conceptual aspects, while at the end, they also incorporated discursive notions. The case analysis highlights relations between reflections that integrate multidimensional writing dimensions and high scientific explanation performance. More research is required to understand the relations between the different dimensions of metalinguistic reflection —conceptual, discursive, and lexicogrammatical— and the quality of written texts.