French, the official language of the province of Quebec, is spoken by over 80% of the children (Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2005) and all new arrivals are educated in French-language schools. Although a very high percentage of children in French-language schools have two French-speaking parents, in Montreal growing numbers of allophone children, speakers of languages other than French or English, are entering the French school system. As Armand et al. (2004: 438) state, 'In Quebec, as is the case in most countries, schools in large urban centers are characterized by a wide ethnocultural, religious and linguistic diversity'.

In 2004–2005, only 53% of the students in the French school board of Montreal had French as a first language (Commission scolaire de Montréal, 2005). Unfortunately, studies show that allophone children experience difficulties in written French all the way up to the post-secondary level (Ministère de l'Éducation du Québec, 1996). It is thus urgent that French-language schools come to grips with the education of non-native speakers in their mainstream programmes. In order to fulfil this need, a large-scale research programme was planned.

The study reported in this chapter is part of a larger research programme investigating the language development of French among allophone children in the Quebec school system, and represents the first step towards creating a description of their language development with the aim of developing programmes designed to help them perform better in school. More specifically, this chapter reports on the results obtained from three metalinguistic tasks devised to examine the meta-syntactic ability of elementary school allophone children.

Metalinguistic Ability Among Children

The notion of metalinguistic ability, defined as a learner's capacity to use his knowledge about language (Gombert, 1992), has been the object of many recent studies (e.g. Armand, 2005).