Conocimientos y actitudes acerca de las metas de la  metacognición en el aula de las lenguas extranjeras en una escuela sueca – Un estudio piloto

Sammanfattning: Metacognition is one of the aims of the Swedish curricula in language teaching. This pilot study focuses on the implementation of this aim in a Swedish high-school. The teachers’ and the pupils’ attitudes towards the pupils’ metacognitive learning strategies and the reasons underpinning these attitudes are examined. The material finding of nine semi-structured interviews, held in a Swedish high-school in language teaching classes of Spanish, French and German, is analyzed with a qualitative method to get an understanding of the situation.The theoretical framework gives an introduction and overview of the actual research on the two key notions for this study: learning strategy and metacognition and related main concepts like cognitive and socio-affective strategies. The literature review shows that metacognitive learning strategies promote the pupils’ autonomy and responsibility in learning a foreign language in a more effective way.The analysis of the empirical material indicates that metacognition is a marginalized topic, although, after explaining them its meaning, both the teachers and the pupils think that it would be important to promote the pupils’ metacognitive learning strategies. However, the teachers emphasize more indirectly and unconsciously on offering different choices to accomplish an exercise than on consciously promoting metacognitive strategies. The main reasons for this were: the lack of time due to large and heterogeneous classes and doubting that most of the pupils could be responsible for their own learning.In cases where pupils had used learning strategies that worked best for them, they had developed these on their own and rarely reflected on them. The work with self-evaluative material like the European Language Portfolio was thought to be a good idea by both teachers and pupils but was not used at this particular school.