METACOGNITION IN MFL

‘Metacognition’ is defined as ‘an awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes’ and involves the development of essential skills that pupils must acquire as they continue their languagelearning journey. These thought processes will involve problem-solving, decision-making and selfmonitoring/reflection. So how do we achieve this in our language-learning lessons?

Our department follows the principles of Dr Gianfranco Conti PhD and his ‘Explicit Strategy Instruction’ approach. He suggests that stating learning objectives and then asking pupils how what they are going to learn will be relevant to them is a good starter. The teacher can model tasks via the interactive whiteboard thinking aloud through the teacher’s own thought processes, including key questions such as ‘Is it a noun? Adjective? How do we know? Is it positive or negative? Does it look like an English word I know?’ Pupils can self-evaluate following a piece of written work with the help of another pupil using a checklist of questions such as ‘were my answers relevant? Did I include a range of language? Did I include different time frames, and how? Were there enough opinions and were these fully justified? Were my verbs conjugated correctly?’ Pausing every now and again in a lesson for a pupil to explain an item of language in their own words is useful. This can also be done in group-work problem-solving activities which will involve some or all of the pupils asking the same metacognitionpromoting questions to each other, and by doing so will model them to the rest of the group. This may involve pupils explaining structures, inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words in context or working out real-life problems such as hotel costings based on a hotel website in the target language. Pupil selfreviews at the end of a task which require then to consider what they found difficult and why, what they didn’t know and what they need to know next time are useful. And asking pupils to write down as much vocabulary as they can from a particular lesson or topic and then sharing their list with a partner enables them to assess their confidence with that particular content. A similar activity to check memory retention is to ask pupils to write down what they know while it is still fresh in their memory and then give to them the same task after fifteen minutes to check how much they can remember when it was not so fresh – so what could they remember, what does that tell them and what do they need to do to close the gap? Following an assessment it can be interesting to ask pupils about their revision and why they may feel they have not done so well, are there alternative revision techniques, what do we do in lessons to help learn vocabulary and can these techniques be used at home? Often pupils revise what they are good at and this results in them not doing as well as they had expected despite revising lots and this can be flagged up. Revision schedules, pupil self-target setting and considering technique and strategy are therefore invaluable tools in the preparation for examinations.

Metacognitive knowledge therefore allows pupils to take on a more active role in their learning process by managing and directing their own learning and eventually finding the best ways for them to acquire, reinforce and extend their language. This will, inevitably, lead to better test performance, learning outcomes, achievement and enjoyment.

Mr G Stephenson