What is metacognition and how can I use it?

Metacognition is commonly defined as “thinking about thinking”. The metacognitive process involves the ability to plan, monitor, and assess one’s use of thinking processes and learning strategies. Metacognition not only plays an important role in language acquisition, but it can increase student engagement, foster confidence, and empower students to be independent and responsible for their learning. As students develop the ability to understand how they learn, recognize areas that need improvement, set goals for improvement, monitor their own learning, and become independent learners, they are acquiring the basic habits and skills needed for lifelong learning. Moreover,  metacognitive skills develop students’ critical thinking skills. This can be done through reflection on their own thought processes. As they reflect on their strengths and needs, students are encouraged to advocate for themselves to get the support they need in order to achieve their goals. When students reflect on their production of ideas, they may critically support those ideas with logical details. In fact, language development and thinking are closely related and the teaching of higher-order thinking skills should be an integral part of an L2 curriculum, reflective reasoning-metacognition is needed.  In my opinion, metacognition expectations should be included in each of the four language abilities of: Listening, Speaking, Writing, and Reading. I also think that it is okay to have students use their L1 in this process because they need to reflect on their thinking processes as well as on their skill in using the target language. However, some of the challenges are that teachers need time to first learn about self-reflection and metacognition and then alter their daily activities to include it. In addition, activities that show metacognition for a grade 7 students are different that activities created for grade 12 student. For example, teachers can create checklists, and guided next steps for younger groups. As for the older groups, they can create exit cards related to learning goals, and lexical items etc. while independent next steps can be requested from those students to make them observe and think about their production.

 Here is my metacognition questions bank that I use when I design student reflections, I use some of these prompts with students to promote their “thinking about thinking”. I thought I’d share those as well because they might be helpful for others. Feel free to use and modify based on your students level.  

For Listening: I ask students to a describe some strategies they found helpful before, during, and after listening.

I ask them to identify their strengths as listeners and also to describe what do they do to make the listening tasks comprehensible. I prompt them by asking: How might you check to be sure you understand what you have heard? What listening strategies did you use? Which ones were helpful? what questions can you ask yourself?”

For Speaking:

How do you self-monitor your speaking skills, by doing what?  What kinds of revisions do you plan to make to your speech? What kind of feedback was most helpful for you? What kinds of non-verbal cues do you use when speaking? How do they affect your partner? What goal might you set to improve your oral communication? Give me examples.

For Reading: I ask them to keep a reading log and use it to track their reading trends; identify which strategies are useful at particular stages of the reading process.

Some of the questions I use are: Can you identify a strategy that you use frequently and automatically? what strategy do you use to remember important points? How does it compare to the strategy that your classmate uses? What strategy do you find effective to help you prepare to read a text? What makes it useful? What strategy do you use to check your comprehension after reading? Why?”

For writing: Some steps they can take to improve their writing skills are to reflect on and select the pre-writing strategies that are best suited to a particular task, to keep a list of new and interesting words and ideas to use in future writing tasks, to plan to use a graphic organizer before writing to rank their ideas in order of importance . Some of the questions that I use: Which strategy do you find most helpful for organizing information before you begin writing, why do we do the writing process? Why do we use graphic organizer? When you are having difficulty putting your ideas into a logical sequence, what strategy might you use to determine the best order?”