Metacognitive strategies to support the writing of narrative texts

As can be seen, the conceptual development in terms of metacognition has enriched the understanding of the metacognitive functioning of students in the writing processes, and at the same time has had an impact on the educational intervention. According to these results, the following proposal establishes a relationship between psychology and education, in order to contribute to the development of educational practices that improve the teaching and learning of self-regulated writing in elementary school students.

This proposal emphasizes the writing of narrative texts. There are two important reasons that justify this emphasis. The first is related to the importance of narrative in our culture, and the second is related to the early capacities children present to produce narratives. In fact, narratives not only transmit cultural values ​​and meaning but also contribute to improving children’s cognitive abilities, memory systems, representations of time and the ability to communicate. In relation to the second reason, research has shown that very early in their development, children use narratives; Between three and five years, children form narrations about their own lives and begin to listen and follow stories from books, videos and television stories.

The intervention proposal is divided into some steps, each with specific activities and recommendations for teachers. The steps have been defined as “times for”, as a way to emphasize the need to dedicate a space and a time suitable for reflection and production in writing, and take them into account helps to transform the idea that writing is put on paper everything you have in your mind. In this sense it is proposed:

 

Time to read

This step underlies the idea that expert scaffolding can come from books written by experts as a cultural product and, in this case, as a strategy to get the child to have experiences with interesting and well-written stories before writing their own stories. The stories written by an expert function as a model that children should imitate, because they are considered to be well written, interesting, coherent and follow grammatically correct rules.

This first step implies that the teacher chooses an exemplary story, for the children to read and comment after the reading. The teacher can guide the comments to the story through questions related to the characters involved in it, their physical characteristics, feelings, thoughts and actions; about the time and space in which the actions take place and, most importantly, about the adventures that happen in the story.

 

Time to plan

Planning involves three processes: the generation of content (which defines what will be written about); the organization of the content, which means ordering it hierarchically, in such a way that the reader understands the structure of the text, and the establishment of objectives to evaluate its quality and effectiveness.

 

Time to write

Only with an active participation in cultural practices, children achieve enough learning from different areas of knowledge, in order to become autonomous later. Therefore, children should write as much as they can and spend a lot of time in this activity. At this point in the program, children apply what they have learned about how experts write, how planning helps create ideas for writing, and how writers feel when they write. For this reason, when the students have answered the basic questions about the story, they should start writing it. For Australian children, they are advised to get online guidance especially if they are dealing with school activities. They can get help from the assignment help Australia.

All the ideas, the notes, the answers to the questions previously presented are the baseline for the children to start writing; therefore, teachers should promote its use as a guide to writing. Finally, teachers are encouraged to provide all the time children need to write their text. The right amount of time is: as much as the students need.