Strategy Self-Verbalization During Remedial Listening Comprehension Instruction

This experiment investigated the effects of strategy self-verbalization on children's self-efficacy and listening comprehension. Children with language deficiencies in grades two through four received instruction in listening comprehension. One-half of the children in each grade verbalized explicit strategies prior to applying them to questions. Strategy self-verbalization led to higher self-efficacy across grades, and promoted performance among third and fourth graders, but did not benefit second graders. Future research should apply strategy selfverbalization to other language skills and should explore the effects of covert fading. Article: Much attention has been directed recently toward the role of private speech in cognitive self-guidance among children (Fuson, 1979; Harris, 1982a, 1982b; Meichenbaum & Goodman, 1971). Private speech refers to the set of speech phenomena that has a self-regulatory function but is not socially communicative (Zivin, 1979). This emphasis on private speech derives historically from the work of Vygotsky (1962), who believed that private speech helped to develop thought through its role in organizing behavior. According to Vygotsky, children employed private speech to help them understand situations and surmount difficulties. Vygotsky hypothesized that overt private speech followed a curvilinear developmental pattern in that it increased until ages 6-7, but then declined and became primarily covert by ages 8-10; however, overt private speech could occur at any age when people encountered obstacles. One research application of this view has explored how overt self-verbalization affects children's performances on cognitive tasks. Several studies have shown that performance is facilitated when children verbalize strategies to be followed, other types of performance aids, or material to be recalled (Asarnow & Meichenbaum, 1979; Coates & Hartup, 1969; Jackson & Calhoun, 1982; Keeney, Cannizzo, & Flavell, 1967; Meichenbaum & Goodman, 1971; Schunk, 1982; Taylor, Josberger, & Whitely, 1973; Whitely & Taylor, 1973). At the same time, no benefits of overt verbalizations have been obtained (Coates & Hartup, 1969; Denney, 1975; Denney & Turner, 1979). Drawing a conclusion about the effects of self-verbalization on task performance is difficult because these studies differed in many important ways: age and type of subjects, type of verbalization, experimental tasks, training procedures. One suggestion is that self-verbalization may be most beneficial for children who typically perform in a deficient manner (Denney & Turner, 1979). For example, Keeney, et al. (1967) presented a serial re-call task to 6and 7-year-old children and identified those who failed to rehearse prior to recall. After these children were trained to rehearse overtly, their recall equaled that of the spontaneous rehearsers. Meichenbaum and Goodman (1971) worked with impulsive children on the Matching Familiar Figures Test (Kagan, 1966). Some children received cognitive modeling of performance strategies, whereas others were administered cognitive modeling plus self-verbalization. The addition of self-verbalization decreased errors and increased response latencies. Asarnow and Meichenbaum (1979) identified kindergartners who did not rehearse spontaneously on a serial recall task. Some children received rehearsal training similar to that of Keeney, et al. (1967), whereas others received self-instructional training with cognitive modeling and self-verbalization. Although both treatments promoted posttest recall, self-instructional training led to greater benefits on a followup test. A series of studies in which educable mentally retarded children were trained to generate elaborations between word associate pairs showed that verbalization of elaborations facilitated recall of associates (Taylor, et al., 1973; Whitely & Taylor, 1973). Coates and Hartup (1969) found that 4-year olds who verbalized the actions of a model as they were performed subsequently reproduced them better than did children who only observed the model. Working with preschoolers, Jackson and Calhoun (1982) found that overt self-verbalization of block design strategies facilitated subsequent performance more than instructions from the experimenter. Schunk (1982) obtained evidence with low arithmetic achievers that self-constructed verbalizations during problem solving enhanced performance more than not verbalizing. These types of subjects ordinarily may not employ suggested performance strategies or rehearse material prior to recall. Many young children may not spontaneously produce verbal mediators that would regulate their performances, whereas most older children do (Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966). Impulsive children may not attend to or rehearse material to be learned, or may not employ suggested performance strategies. The typically poor performances of low achievers also may be due in part to these factors. Retarded children possess cognitive deficiencies that interfere with their performances. For these types of children, overt self-verbalization of performance strategies or other task material may help to reduce deficiencies. Self-verbalization may not facilitate performance when children can adequately handle the task demands. Because self-verbalization constitutes an additional task, it even could hinder performance if it distracted children from the task at hand. Thus, Denney (1975) modeled performance strategies for 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old normal children on a 20-question task. Older children who verbalized strategies while they performed scored no better than did children who did not verbalize, and verbalization seemed to interfere with the performance of 6year olds. The verbalizations, which consisted of specific strategies, apparently proved too distracting for the youngest children. Among normal children ranging from 3 to 10 years, strategy modeling plus self-verbalization yielded no benefits on different cognitive tasks compared with strategy modeling alone (Denney & Turner, 1979). Subjects constructed their own verbalizations, which may have been less distracting than Denney's (1975) specific statements. Coates and Hartup (1966) also included 7-year olds and found that verbalization of the model's actions did not improve subsequent reproduction compared with passive observation. These children could adequately regulate their task attention and cognitively process the model's actions without verbalizing. The present study investigated the effects of overt self-verbalization of listening comprehension strategies among children with language deficiencies in grades two to four. Strategy self-verbalization was expected to enhance children's performances. It seemed likely that the low language achievement of the present sample was due in part to factors such as inadequate attention during instruction and failure to generate relevant verbal mediators that would help guide performance. Overt strategy self-verbalization forces children to attend to strategies and is a form of self-rehearsal, which should promote strategy encoding and subsequent availability when children engage in comprehension activities (Denney, 1975; Fuson, 1979). Self-rehearsal of information to be remembered facilitates later performance (Asarnow & Meichenbaum, 1979; Coates & Hartup, 1969; Jackson & Calhoun, 1982; Keeney, et al., 1967). The performance benefits of strategy self-verbalization were expected to be, greater for the older children (i.e., third and fourth graders) than for the second graders. Although developmental research has lent some support to Vygotsky's hypothesis in that the amount of spontaneous private speech decreases as children become older (Fuson, 1979), research also demonstrates that the proportion of private speech that is self-regulating increases with age (Fuson, 1979). Other research shows that self-regulating private speech does tend to become covert with age (Rubin, 1979). Greater use of covert speech that includes strategies ought to facilitate strategy application to the extent that children utilize covert speech when subsequently given comprehension exercises. Older children also were expected to perform better than younger subjects because the present listening comprehension task was expected to be difficult given subjects' language deficiencies. It seemed possible that the demands of self-verbalization might compete with those of the listening comprehension task, which could hinder the youngest subjects' encoding of strategies and subsequent availability of that encoding. This study also explored the effects of strategy self-verbalization on children's self-efficacy. According to Bandura, different procedures change behavior in part through the common mechanism of creating and strengthening perceived self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1981, 1982b). Self-efficacy refers to personal judgments of one's capability to perform behaviors in specific situations that may contain ambiguous, unpredictable, or stressful elements. Self-efficacy can affect choice of activities, effort expenditure, persistence in the face of difficulties, and task accomplishments. Efficacy information is conveyed through self-performances, vicarious (observational) means, verbal persuasion, and physiological indexes. Strategy self-verbalization was expected to promote self-efficacy more than not verbalizing strategies. The present subjects initially observed a teacher verbalize comprehension strategies, after which they verbalized the strategies prior to applying them to questions. Such teacher modeling is a vicarious source of efficacy information; that is, telling children to verbalize the same strategies represents a close match to the modeled behavior and implicitly conveys that children can succeed if they do so (Schunk, 1982). This type of close match can create a sense of personal control over achievement outcomes, which is hypothesized to promote self-efficacy (Bandura, 1982a). Children's initial sense of efficacy is substantiated later as they successfully apply strategies. Schunk (1982) investigated the effects of different types of self-verbalization; the type that represented the closest match to the model's verbalizations promoted self-efficacy the most. No hypothesis was advanced on whether self-verbalization would affect self-efficacy differently across grades because there was no theoretical or research evidence on this point.