Children’s definitional skills and their relations with metalinguistic awareness and school achievement

Definitional skills, as a measure of decontextualized language abilities, are closely related to school success, in general, and the development of literacy, in particular (Snow et al., 1989). The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relations between definitional skills, metalinguistic awareness and school achievement in Italian children at the beginning (first grade) and the end (fifth grade) of primary school. Participants were asked to define a list of 24 words (Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives) and their answers were scored for both form and content; the level of their metalinguistic ability was measured by means of a questionnaire concerning different components of metalinguistic competence. School achievement was assessed through pupils’ school marks; furthermore, teachers’ ratings of children’s linguistic-communicative ability were collected and correlated with definitional skills. Results clearly show positive relations between definitional skills, metalinguistic awareness and school success at both levels of age.