This paper reports a study that investigated the role of schooling in syntactic awareness development. Forty-three Brazilian adults divided in three groups according to their literacy level participated in the study. They were given three syntactic awareness tasks: judgement of correct sentences, judgement of incorrect sentences and a correction task. The results showed no evidence for the effects of schooling in syntactic awareness development. However, they suggest that different levels of metalinguistic awareness are required for performing different syntactic awareness tasks.