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

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.