The three plurals of this conference theme - languages, literatures and literacies - reflect current developments in L1 education moving from homogeneity to heterogeneity. L1 has been based on the grammar of a national standard written language and on texts of one national literature. But digital communication, local multilingualism and global economy currently challenge this paradigm. Hence, L1 education tends to embrace all literature(s), texts of other school subjects and language awareness and language use of oral and written registers of all languages.



Our symposium on Educational Linguistics discusses some expanding dimensions of metalinguistic activity in L1 classrooms: expansion to secondary education, expansion from practice to theory, expansion from linguistic knowledge to language skills, expansion of methodologies to inductive and functional approaches and expansion across single-language boundaries. The perspectives about classroom metalinguistic tasks are centered on three different language teaching contexts: Estonian L1 in Estonia, Catalan L1 in Spain, English L2 in Canada and French L1 in Canada.



The four papers of the symposium seem to reveal a shared tension in the process of expansion of L1 metalinguistic activity between the role of language knowledge and language skills. The first study considers the tension between linguistic theory and language teaching. The second study, about grammar and writing, suggests that knowledge is a consequence of reflexive language skills. On the contrary, the last study about plurilingual education, breaking down barriers between languages, shows the positive use of previous L2 knowledge in L1 metalinguistic awareness tasks. In this study the tension between knowledge and skills is analyzed both from the L1 and L2 point of view in two different papers.

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