Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing "terminological cultures". This was found to be substantially…

Metalanguage is a term that is increasingly to be found in the applied linguistic/language awareness literature. However, not all writers use it in the same way; some seem to be equating it with metalinguistic terminology. Tracing the term from its philosophical roots, this paper accepts a broader definition of metalanguage as "language about…

This paper investigates L2 English learners' reactions to mixed personality in a pedagogic grammar. Personality refers to how authors represent themselves in a text and interact with their readers (e.g. personally via the use of personal pronouns or impersonally via the use of the passive, etc.); mixed personality occurs when an author switches…

This paper reports an investigation into the language used by writers of grammar of English and learners' awareness of it. Two key features of this genre are whether and how writers present themselves in the text ("personality") and whether and to what extent they qualify their statements via the use of modality. Two comparable texts, one from a…

Describes a study investigating the knowledge of metalinguistic terminology in college students in Hong Kong and compares this knowledge to their English teachers' estimation of that knowledge and desire to use such terminology. Findings reveal wide differences between learners in their knowledge of terminology and wide discrepancies between…