Young children's private speech as a precursor to metacognitive strategy use during task engagement

Abstract

The overall purpose of these three investigations was to test the usefulness of private speech utterances as a means for understanding children's verbal self‐guidance during school task performance. A private speech coding system was derived from synthesizing the literature on private speech (e.g., Berk, 1986a), self‐regulated learning (e.g., Rohrkemper, 1989), and metacognition (Brown, 1987; Meichenbaum, 1977). Also, Vygotsky's theory of verbal self‐regulation (1934/1962, 1934/1987) served as the guiding theoretical perspective. To analyze verbal self‐guidance and to gather information about the importance of student characteristics (namely, autonomy, n = 118; academically advanced, n = 34; and creativity, n = 16), three separate studies using a different data source for each study, were conceptualized. Similar patterns of findings emerged; groups designated as more autonomous and more academically advanced used significantly less task‐irrelevant private speech; all groups used less nonfacilitative task‐relevant, and also more facilitative, metacognitive task‐relevant private speech. Findings are important to the explanation of young children's patterns of self‐guiding speech for school tasks and for how this speech may be an important link to cognitive and metacognitive development and to self‐regulated learning.

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