Young children’s responses to teachers’ metacognitive questions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ways that teachers use questions to promote metacognitive knowledge and skills in early childhood classrooms. Taking a Conversation Analytic approach, we show that although metacognitive questions were infrequent in our data, they could be used to create learning opportunities for students to develop their knowledge of word-decoding strategies and metalinguistic concepts that can be used to aid reading. This study of in situ classroom interaction supports earlier work suggesting that metacognitive knowledge and skills develop in early childhood, and demonstrates the usefulness of metacognitive questions as a pedagogical strategy to promote metacognitive thinking and teach literacy skills to children in their first year of school.