"The Role of Metacognition in Second LanguageTeaching and Learning" By Neil Anderson
Strategies
Benefits
Ignites ones thinking
Leads to more profound thinking
Improved performance
Empower second language learners.
Better prepared to make conscious decisions about what they can do to improve their learning.
Distinctions between cognitive and metacognitive
Cognitive
Maximize interaction and input
Metacognitive
Allow's students to plan, control, and evalutae their learning.
Teh ability to choose and evaluate one's strategies is of central importance.
Metacognition
Defined as simply thinking about thinking
More than one metacognitive process may be occuring at a time during a second language learning task.
Five primary components
Preparing and planning for learning
Students are thinking about what they need or want to accomplish and how they intend to go about it.
Teachers can promote by being explicity about the particular learning goals and guiding the students in setting their owvn learning goals.
The more clearly articulated the goal, the easier it will be for the learners to measure their progess.
Selecting and using learning strategies
The learner can think and make conscious decisions about the learning process.
Explicitly teach students a variety of learning strategies and also use when to use them.
No single strategie will work in every instance.
Teachers need to show students how to choose the strategy that has the best chance of success in a given situation.
Monitoring strategy use
Students are better able to keep themselves in track to meet their learning goals.
Students nned to ask themselves periodically whether or not they are still using those strategies as intended.
Students can be taught to monitor their use of this stategy.
Student's should pause occasionally and ask themselves questions about what they are doing.
Orchestrating various strategies
The ability to coordinate, organize, and make associations among the various strategies available is a major distinction between strong and week second language learners.
Teachers can assist students by making them aware of multiple strategies available to them.
The teacher needs to show students how to recognize when one strategy isn't working and how to move on to another.
Evaluating Strategy use and learning
Second anguage learners are actively involved in metacognition when they attempt to evaluate whether what they are doing is effective
Teachers can help students evaluate with four questions.
What am I trying to accomplish?
What strategies am I using?
How well am I using them
What else could I do?
Kruger and Dunning's research
It is possible to teach learners at all ability levels to assess their own performance more accuratley.
Learners whose skills bases are weak in a particular area tend to overestimate their ability in that area.
High-ability learners don't recognize the extent of their knowledge.
Tasks invloving logic and grammer, improved self-assessment corresponded with improvement in the skills being assessed.