Vandergrift and Goh

Congratulations to Larry Vandergrift and Christine Goh on the publication of their ‘Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action‘

They define metacognition as:

‘our ability to think about our own thinking or “cognition”, and by extension, to think about how we process information for a range of purposes and manage the way we do it. It is the ability to step back, as it were, from what occupies our mind at a particular moment in time to analyse and evaluate what we are thinking’ (pp. 83-84)

They go on  to quote  John Flavell as the first user of the term – who wrote that metacognition is:

‘one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes and … active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in relation to the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, usually in the service of some goal or objective’ (1976: 232)

Flavell, J. H. (1976). Metacognitive aspects of problem solving. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp.231-236). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

I’ve not had time to give it a careful read yet, but I hope to soon, and will report back.