Helping Young Multilingual Learners Develop Their Metacognitive Skills

Early in my teaching career, I noticed that elementary school–aged multilingual learners heavily relied on me to make sense of grade-level content. I incorporated English language development (ELD) strategies into lessons but found that students struggled to use them. Research on how multilingual learners process language and content helped me see that simply passing along unfamiliar ELD supports actually added to students’ cognitive demands.

I decided to take a step back. I asked myself what the purpose of each support was and when I wanted students to use it. Then I started explicitly teaching metacognitive skills like I would anything else. An increase in student independence, engagement, and academic growth followed.

Below, I’ve listed three common supports—visuals, sentence frames, and pair-share—and explained how teachers can provide elementary school multilingual learners with the metacognitive skills they need to effectively integrate those supports.

Accessing Visuals Through Metacognitive Skills

Visuals include anchor charts, story maps, and word definitions that are posted around the classroom as permanent resources. To help multilingual learners use visuals, I recommend the following:

Think aloud: Modeling internal thinking out loud serves as a reminder for students about the resources they have available to them and also allows them to approach visuals with more confidence. I encourage other teachers to speak out loud about what a student should be thinking when using a visual. A couple of examples:

• “I need an adjective for my sentence, but I forgot what those are. Let me take a look at our parts of speech poster.”
• “I know that when we created this poster, we wrote about examples of adjectives. My teacher always uses the color purple for adjectives, so I’m going to find the purple words and reread what we learned.”

Guided practice: Build in practice time for students to interact with visuals. Ask questions like “If I need to find an adjective, where do I look?” When students point at the answer, or discuss the answer as a group, they’re lowering the cognitive demand typically required of accessing a visual.

Consistency: Frequently encourage students to use visuals as a resource. When students ask for help, first redirect them to a corresponding visual, which reinforces good habits. I ask questions aloud like “What in our classroom could help me solve this?” and “How could I use our parts of speech poster to help me if I’m stuck?” Long-term consistency is a vital part of making sure students become independent learners.

Accessing Sentence Frames Through Metacognitive Skills

Sentence frames are structured sentence starters or prompts with words intentionally omitted, which guide students as they strive to achieve their communication goals. To help multilingual learners use sentence frames, I recommend the following:

Think aloud: A think-aloud model enables students to more easily consider which sentence frames they need based on what they’re trying to communicate. For example, I might say to my students, “I need some help adding to my friend’s idea. I’m going to find a sentence frame that we’ve been practicing using.” This technique encourages students to replicate the same behavior when they’re working independently.

Communication purpose: Students internalize sentence frames not just through practice, but through understanding purpose. I often communicate the larger point of a sentence frame; for example, I might say, “Let’s practice sharing our opinions with a sentence frame, which helps you share your opinions in a complete sentence.” When students feel confident about the purpose behind specific sentence frames, they’re more likely to turn to them.

Real-time feedback: I give students individual feedback in the moment, especially when they’re practicing a new sentence frame. The feedback should be short, simple, and focused on both accuracy and clarity of expression: “I love that you wanted to share your opinion. Make sure you start your sentence with ‘I think,’ so that we know you are sharing your own opinion about the topic. Let’s try that again now.”

Accessing Pair-Share Through Metacognitive Skills

Pair-share is a communication routine that gives two students a specific topic or question to discuss. It provides guidelines on conversation basics such as who speaks first, how long they should speak for, and how to receive information. To help multilingual learners use pair-share, I recommend the following:

Think aloud: It benefits students when teachers explain out loud the sort of thing they’d say to a partner during pair-share. For instance, a teacher might say to the class, “I want to talk to my partner about my opinion on vegetables. I know I need to speak in a complete sentence with my partner. I’m going to use our opinion sentence frame and fill in the blank space with ‘I don’t like vegetables.’” This framing gets students to anchor their own cognitive practices to the teacher exemplar.

Active listening: There are two main components of active listening: the ability to listen to a peer and comprehend their answer, and the ability to listen with a communication goal. For the first component, I ask my students to participate in short listening opportunities with peers on nonacademic topics. While they do so, students should reshare what their partner just said. It’s more important for a student to demonstrate their own understanding of what their partner said—even if they reshare in a partial sentence—than it is for a student to parrot what they heard another student communicate.

As for the second component: Students need to learn how to listen with an individual purpose. I try to nurture short exchanges between students with a sentence frame support. Practice examples include students listening to an opinion and then agreeing or disagreeing with that opinion, adding onto ideas, and asking clarifying questions. I recommend starting with nonacademic exchanges to ensure that students have the skills to eventually converse over more challenging content.

I will often jump in with feedback or a redirection when a pair veers into off-topic conversations or struggles to move past a certain point. I’ve noticed that if I’m able to provide consistent, targeted feedback to students at the beginning of the year, then they incorporate my feedback into pair-shares as the school year progresses. I’ve also observed that if I have lots of students who are off-topic or not following a prompt, it’s likely because I prematurely introduced a challenging skill too quickly. In those cases, I go back and focus on the specific skill with students before reintroducing it.