Metalinguistic skill is the ability to assume an objective attitude toward language. Metalinguistic awareness is less easily acquired and appears later developmentally than speaking and listening skills. What one needs to know to perceive and use language is not necessarily the same thing that one needs to know to reflect on and comment on language. Empirical studies have disclosed individual variation in metalinguistic functioning even among adolescents and adults whose overall language competence appears to be quite similar. Nineteen fourth grade students were interviewed in a study that explored metalinguistic awareness and its variation in upper elementary school children. In addition to the interview, each child completed a self-report instrument to gauge reading ability and attitudes toward reading and language-related activities. Children's judgments were examined by means of four tasks--language objectivity, grammaticality, illicit conjunction and comparison, and ambiguity. Preliminary inspection of the data revealed that children in the same grade, of approximately the same age, and in the same classroom show a wide range of performance on these metalinguistic tasks. (HOD)