Metacognitive Approaches to Developing Oracy

Developing Speaking and Listening with Young Children

Roy Evans, Deborah Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317996231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

The acquisition of speech and language represent significant achievements for all children. These aspects of child development have received substantial attention in the research literature and a considerable body of theoretical knowledge exists to chart progress from infancy to maturity. Cross-cultural studies have identified the common purposes served by the acquisition of oral language by children, and the essential similarity in the sequence through which speech develops irrespective of geography and culture.

What is less clear is precisely 'how' children learn to say what they mean and 'how' teachers and parents can support and enhance the development of meaningful speech in their children. Until now, children's speech has been underused as a means of promoting learning in the formal school setting. New requirements within the National Curriculum are trying to address this gap, but there remains a lack of clarity as to what this means for practice, and how it relates to the broad base of curricular objectives.

This book brings together a body of work, from different countries; it offers an improved understanding of how strategies for developing speaking and listening may impact metacognitive awareness, and raise standards of literacy and dialogic thinking for all children.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

Speaking, listening, planning and assessing: the teacher’s role in developing metacognitive awareness

Deborah Jones

Introduction

There is a sense in which individuals are helped by articulating thoughts. It is often within the process of explaining or describing what we think that thoughts ‘click’ into place and we understand what we already know. In other words, making our implicit thoughts explicit through talk is a powerful learning tool for both adults and children. It may be assumed that because talk is interwoven into the fabric of the classroom and daily life in general, competency develops ‘naturally’ and without the need for explicit teaching. By contrast, this paper highlights the importance of rigorous planning for speaking and listening and the need to plan in specific and regular opportunities for assessing this area. In addition, the paper emphasizes the development of children’s metacognitive awareness as integral to a powerful teaching and learning environment.

The UK context

Within the UK, the place of speaking and listening in the curriculum has had a chequered history. In 1988 the Cox Report (English for ages 5–11) stated that the value of talk as a means of learning was widely accepted as 1987 saw the establishing of the National Oracy Project to enhance the role of speaking and listening in the learning process. Although the English National Curriculum (1988, 2000) gave the same weighting to speaking and listening as to reading and writing, the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998) focused almost exclusively on reading and writing. However, UK studies have shown that children have few opportunities to engage in active enquiry through talk (Galton & Williamson, 1992). Equally, there has been concern in relation to the level of language competence exhibited by children on entrance to school (both in the UK and in other countries (Locke et al., 2002; Riley et al., 2004). In response to a perceived need from teachers, guidelines were developed in the UK (DfEE, 2000; DfES, 2003), in order to once again raise the profile of speaking and listening in the classroom.

A rationale for speaking and listening

It is important that a clear rationale for developing speaking and listening is established within classroom contexts, a rationale informed by key theories. The importance of cooperation between adults and children, and between children and their peers, has been highlighted as integral to sound classroom practice. Within the model of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978), learning takes place most effectively within a context of social interaction through the joint construction of meaning. The child is able to move towards new learning with the help of a more competent peer. Here the links between thought and language are stressed. In addition, the more experienced adult or peer may act as a scaffold for learning (Bruner, 1986). The pivotal role of the adult is to provide the necessary scaffolds for learning that develop children’s knowledge, skills and understanding. Furthermore, the importance of the conception of ‘language as a tool for collective sense-making, or “thinking together”’ (Mercer et al., 2003, p. 81) has been acknowledged. Speaking and listening, and exploratory talk and reflection, are fundamental to this process.

The teacher’s role

The teacher’s role in developing speaking and listening is crucial. Indeed ‘the teacher’s role in explaining, questioning, describing, organizing and evaluating in the classroom is mostly conducted through talk’. There are four clear, interlinked approaches that teachers can adopt to promote effective speaking and listening. This can be achieved through dialogic teaching, developing metacognitive awareness, planning and assessing.

Dialogic teaching

Teachers need to reflect on the kinds of speaking and listening they promote in the classroom. Their discourse is fundamental to the development of children’s own talk (Coles, 2005; Myhill, 2006). Most classroom practice is characterised by initiation, response and feedback (IRF)—i.e. that is initiation though teacher questioning, response by the child and feedback, or closing down, by the teacher. In such instances, interactions between children and teachers are brief and contain closed questions, with the children focusing on the ‘right’ answer. Here, then, there is little speculative or exploratory talk; dialogic teaching has been promoted in order to counter this (Alexander, 2006). Alexander (2003) recommends a move to improving interactions through dialogic teaching, in which there are four conditions encouraging this:

• Collective: the focus here is on children and teachers addressing learning tasks together, whether as a group or whole class. The point is that no one works in isolation.
• Reciprocal: children and teachers listen to each other share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints.
• Cumulative: the importance of building on one anothers’ ideas is highlighted.
• Supportive: children can articulate ideas in a risk-free environment and help on another to reach common understandings.

It is also important to note that the community outside the classroom presents a rich and varied picture of language use, evolving styles and differing communicative practices, where, for example, individuals switch between different languages and dialects. Classrooms should mirror this.

Developing metacognitive awareness

The teacher has an important function in developing children’s metacognitive awareness. This lies at the heart of effective and powerful teaching. Metacognition refers to an individual’s awareness of his/her cognitive processes and strategies (Flavell, 1979; Flavell et al., 1995). It relates to the human capacity to be self-reflective, to consider how one thinks and knows; it directs attention to what has been assimilated and understood, and the ways in which this relates to the processes of learning. In addition, metacognition develops thinking as implicit understanding becomes explicit: Vygotsky (1962) has argued that when the process of learning is brought to a conscious level, children become aware of their own thought processes that helps them to gain control over how they learn. Talk is fundamental to this.

The development of metacognition demands understanding of different levels of awareness. The notion of different types of use can illustrate this (Fisher & Williams, 2002). Tacit use is characterized by children making decisions without really thinking about them. When children become consciously aware of a strategy or decision-making process marks aware use. The point at which children are able to select the best strategies for problem-solving is known as strategic use. In reflective use children reflect on their thinking before, during and after the learning and metacognitive process. As a result, they are able to evaluate progress and set targets for improvement.

Metacognition is a complex process whose development demands a variety of teaching skills, dependent on three key factors (Williams, 2006). First, the task must be worthy of serious thought. Clearly this necessitates planning which is both clear and appropriate. Secondly, the thinking and reasoning of pupils must be appreciated, requiring the establishment of a classroom ethos in which children can take risks without fear of reprisals and where a spirit of mutual respect and exploration is valued. Third, time needs to be granted to children in order to think about their thinking and to articulate thoughts about their learning. Strategies such as talking to teachers and peers in a structured way or keeping journals can facilitate this process. The role of the teacher in modelling the metacognitive process is central in asking questions that encourage children to consider how, for example, they solve problems; why they accept or reject particular ideas; or why, perhaps, they would undertake the process differently another time.

Planning

In addition, planning regarding both speaking and listening is a fundamental part of the teacher’s role. When planning for talk, it is important to consider the nature of talk, and in so doing, to identify four discrete, but interdependent, aspects of speaking and listening:

1. social:developing relationships;
2. communicative: transferring meaning;
3. cultural: different meanings may be adopted by different speech communities (among children this might be associated with popular culture);
4. cognitive: using talk as a means of learning.

Teachers should plan to develop these aspects; indeed all are necessary of progress if a child is to become a well-rounded speaker. Children need to learn about the social elements of talk, the expression of feelings, the development of relationships and how additional aspects, such as body language, work together with talk in order to develop such relationships and affect or sharpen communication.

The cognitive aspect, however, is fundamental: in planning for effective speaking and listening opportunities, we are also planning for effective learning. An analysis of children’s joint classroom work (Littleton et al., 2005) has revealed three different types of talk in the classroom: disputational, unproductive disagreement; cumulative, or adding uncritically to what has been said; and exploratory, which demonstrates the active joint engagement of the children with one another’s ideas (p. 169). Planning for effective learning is facilitated by focusing on exploratory talk. The National Oracy Project (NOP) acknowledged that: ‘learning is the product of the interaction between the old and the new, the known and the not known … through talk it is possible to explore and clarify new meanings, review and revise old meanings, until there can be an accommodation between the two’ (Norman, 1992, p. 41). Mercer (2000) highlighted the value of this kind of exploratory talk but notes that observational research indicates very little of it occurs naturally in the classroom.

However, further research (Cormack et al., 1998) has indicated that, despite fears of teachers that children would not be focused, when children were provided with structured opportunities to work with their peers, they were able to use speaking and listening to:

• interrogate their own understanding;
• aid recall;
• instruct others;
• work on ideas and propositions;
• problematize;
• argue a personal point of view;
• rehearse subject-specific language;
• progressively shape knowledge;
• generate ideas;
• ‘sponsor’ learning.

Cormack et al. (1998) also highlighted that this effective use of speaking and listening for cognitive purposes was dependent on the clarity of the task—i.e. children knew what kind of talk was required—and an appropriate selection of topic, which allowed children to build on their previous knowledge and understanding.

In order to inform planning, teachers need to consider audience, purpose and type of talk. This approach is based on functional linguistics (Halliday, 1978), where the structure of the language used and the structure of the social action are mutually determining. As such, we vary what we say and how we say it, according to who we are with (the audience) and why we are speaking (the purpose). For children, development and progression in their speaking and listening skills is marked by an increasing confidence and competence in achieving these aims. Although children may implicitly be able to vary how they speak according to who they are with, the opportunities for extending their speaking and listening repertoire nevertheless need careful planning (Jones, 2006). Norman (1992) states that: ‘the quality of children’s talk is greatly affected by features not necessarily related to their oral ability’ (p. 76). Studies have shown how gender, for example, impacts specifically on speaking and listening (Baxter, 1999; Hunter et al., 2005), and literacy in general (Gambell & Hunter, 2000). Consideration of a wide range of factors, such as gender, group size, personality, confidence, self-esteem, competence in additional languages and use of non-standard dialects, needs to take place. In order to gain a comprehensive picture of the child’s abilities in this regard, all these aspects then need to be considered, and it is part of teachers’ roles to act in the light of any factors that may be impeding pupils’ development and performance.

Assessing

Within the UK, National Curriculum assessment has undergone many changes since its introduction. Each year, handbooks of guidance (e.g. QCA, 2006) lay down the statutory assessment requirements for each key stage.¹ Both summative assessment, measuring attainment after teaching and learning, and formative assessment, informing the teaching and learning processes, is required.

There have been several important influences on the way assessment is approached. As a result of extensive research, the work of Black and Wiliam as recorded in Assessment for Learning: Beyond the Black Box (Assessment Reform Group, 1999) found that formative assessment strategies raise standards of attainment, and produced five key factors that improve learning through assessmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial: Persepctives on oracy—towards a theory of practice
• 1. Speaking, listening, planning and assessing: the teacher’s role in developing metacognitive awareness
• 2. Oral language development
• 3. Dialogic teaching: developing thinking and metacognition through philosophical discussion
• 4. ‘Listening to myself’: improving oracy and literacy among children who fall behind
• 5. Narrative learning, EAL and metacognitive development
• 6. Acquisition of hearing, listening and speech skills by and during key stage 1
• 7. Developing the communicative competence and narrative thinking of four and five year olds in educational settings
• 8. Oracy: social facets of language learning
• 9. The prosaics of figurative language in preschool: some observations and suggestions for research
• 10. Language development in the years before school: a comparison of developmental assets in home and child care settings
• 11. From folktales to algorithms: developing the teacher’s role as principal storyteller in the classroom
• 12. Supporting the mother tongue: pedagogical approaches
• 13. A longitudinal investigation of mothers’ mind-related talk to their 12- to 24-month-old infants
• 14. Constructing language: evidence from a French–English bilingual child
• 15. Digital story telling in a science classroom: reflective self-learning (RSL) in action
• Index