Activating metalinguistic awareness is thought to be significant in learning foreign languages. That is especially the case in Japanese schools, where very limited quantity of English is provided for learners. Metalinguistic awareness includes many aspects of language, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. The present investigation focused on learners' syn1actic intuition, and two preliminary studies were conducted. In one, junior high school students were required to choose verbs while reading an extremely difficult text in English. In the second study, students were asked to identify the parts of speech of several words while they read another difficult text. The results indicated that the students depended too much on the meanings of words-not on syntactic information given in the context-when they read English passages.