ENGLISH (L2) CAN BE TAUGHT EFFECTIVELY BY USING META LANGUAGE AT SECONDARY LEVEL IN PAKISTAN

This article tests the assumption that met language plays a vital role in teaching English as a second language. It also verifies the assumption that students / teachers feel comfortable to learn/ teach English with help of met languages. Especially when English teachers are teaching the use of different verb tenses and providing explanations of how and why those different tenses are appropriate to different sentence construction patterns, they are using met language. One topic that is sidelined in the professional literature on second language (L2) teaching and learning is the use of met language in the classroom. In the past three decades, explicit and formal instruction in L2 grammar has fallen from its centrality in traditional pedagogical approaches and been relegated to a peripheral position in many classrooms, due to the joint influences of some popular theoretical claims, findings from early empirical studies about the disassociation between learners’ explicit knowledge of L2 target structures and their ability to use these structures. Data was collected through questionnaires. The questionnaire was made for students. Questionnaire was consisting of 22 items. The sample of study was 200 students of different private and government high schools. The data was collected from all respondents. The data was analyzed by using SPSS. The mean and frequency were counted. Teacher’s (Government and Private Schools) comments about the use of meta language in the class are also included in this study. It concludes that students need to be taught the appropriate vocabulary with the help of met language as they are initially being exposed to a wide range of different genres while reading English text books. They should be explicitly taught genres and the met language of these from an early age.