ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
This article is part of the Research TopicExamining Metalinguistic Awareness in Multilingual LearnersView all 4 articles
Navigating language learning through metalinguistic beliefs: A theoretical exploration informed by multilingual narratives
Provisionally accepted
- University of Münster, Münster, Germany
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This article examines how multilingual learners construct and express metalinguistic beliefs in narrative accounts of their language learning histories. Drawing on six multilingual life-story interviews, the study conceptualizes these beliefs not as fixed internal knowledge structures but as discursively enacted interpretations, visible through stance markers, modality, adverbs, generic-person constructions, and narrative sequencing. The analysis identifies three recurring belief domains: intuitive ontologies of language (as structured systems, cultural worlds, or cognitive representations), assumptions about learners' dispositions and self-regulatory tendencies, and folk theories of learning as experiential, cumulative, pattern-based, and condition-dependent. These beliefs function as interpretive tools through which participants explain progress, assign agency, and create coherence across multilingual trajectories. By situating beliefs within discursive practice rather than survey-based cognition, the study offers a refined conceptualization of metalinguistic beliefs and highlights the importance of multilingual contexts for understanding how such interpretive frameworks develop and operate.
Keywords: Language learning histories, metacognition, metacognitive beliefs, metalinguistic beliefs, Multilingualism, narrative inquiry
Received: 30 Nov 2025; Accepted: 31 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Andrea Quinteros Ortiz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Constanza Andrea Quinteros Ortiz
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