ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, interest in the social and individual phenomenon of multilingualism has considerably grown. Aronin and Singleton (2012) have identified multilingualism as the new world order. Scholars working in the area of third language acquisition and multilingualism are interested in the exploration of the most important factors guiding the language learning process in a multilingual context. Metalinguistic awareness has been identified as one, or even the key factor of multilingual learning. The primary goal of this chapter is to look into the nature of metalinguistic awareness and identify it as an emergent property in multilingual learners and users, which at the same time describes it as a feature of multilingual proficiency which cannot be studied with a monolingual yardstick.
