This study informs research on how private speech, which is typically seen as a cognitive ability, is utilized during an emotion-eliciting task. This research helps to bridge the divide between cognitive and emotional aspects of children's self-regulation by integrating how cognitive private speech strategies may be used to regulate emotion. Preschool-aged children (n = 116) completed a frustration task. Emotional expressions (anger and sadness), emotion regulation strategies (distraction and self-comforting behaviors), persistence (latency to quit and duration of on-task behavior), and children's private speech were coded. Whereas higher levels of nonfacilitative task-relevant private speech were associated with higher levels of both sadness and anger, social speech was positively associated with sadness, and inaudible muttering was positively associated with anger. Private speech, specifically vocalizations and task-irrelevant private speech, was also positively associated with the regulation strategies of self-comforting and distraction. Facilitative task-relevant private speech, however, was negatively associated with distraction. Finally, higher levels of social speech were associated with less persistence, while higher levels of facilitative task-relevant private speech was associated with more persistence. Findings from this study support the idea that private speech can have a regulatory effect during frustrating situations that children experience. Private speech occurred alongside emotions and regulation strategies in meaningful ways. Including measures of private speech in future studies on emotion regulation will add more detail and depth to researchers' understanding of children's regulatory abilities. In the future, interventions could be created to encourage children's use of private speech to enhance their emotion regulatory abilities. / Master of Science

In recent years there has been a move towards promoting the well-being and positive outcomes for children and young people who are at risk of or identified with emotional and behavioural difficulties. There has been interest from researchers as to why some young people are able to successfully manage very difficult situations, whilst others are not able cope and may as a result impact on their well-being and overall future outcomes in life. This study aimed to explore the role of executive functions and private speech in relation to resiliency as there has been little previous research exploring these areas together. Using the knowledge of previous research and literature, two research questions were devised; in what ways might executive functioning and young people’s resiliency relate to each other and in what ways does private speech provide insight into young people’s resiliency. This quantitative research made use of a correlation design to explore the relationships between Year 7 students’ perceptions of their resiliency and their neurocognitive executive functions. This exploratory study comprised 162 Year 7 students, who completed the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents (Prince-Embury, 2007) to identify the students’ resiliency profiles. A cross section of students was selected for further investigation. 28 students completed a number of computerised tests to explore their executive functions and their private speech was captured using a video-recorder. The study revealed a number of relationships with particular aspects of executive functioning identified and particular areas of the students’ resiliency. However, the extent to which these skills are related or independent of each other is not known. The counter-intuitive findings suggest that there might be other factors which contributed to such findings, including the students’ perceptions of their competency and their sense of self-worth. There appeared to be differences in students’ use of private speech dependent on their perceived personal strengths and vulnerability. In addition, identification of the students’ non-verbal communication and paralanguage enabled greater access to students’ emotional reactions to the task situations. This helped to explore the way that the students appeared to be able to cope and manage these tasks and explore their emotional regulation further. These results are discussed in light of previous literature and research evidence and implications for practice and future research highlighted.

Children's self-regulation has been found to be related to optimal developmental outcomes; however, researchers are still investigating how cognitive and emotional regulation work together to explain development of self-regulation. This study investigated how children's private speech interacted with emotion regulation, conceptualized as effortful control, to predict children's emotionality. I also examined how private speech and effortful control may be different strategies of self-regulation that more fully explain the relation of parental emotion coaching philosophy to children's emotionality. Preschool-aged children (n = 156) and their primary caregivers participated in this study. Parental emotion coaching was observationally measured as encouraging of negative emotion when discussing a time when children were upset. Children's non-beneficial private speech was transcribed and coded during a cognitively-taxing task. Children's effortful control (attention shifting, attention focusing, and inhibitory control) and negative emotion (anger and sadness) were measured using parent-report on the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ). It was found that children's parent-reported effortful control significantly mediated the relation between parent's observed emotion coaching philosophy and children's reported negative emotionality. Parents who did more emotion coaching had children reported to have greater effortful control and in turn were reported as less emotionally negative. While parental emotion coaching did not predict children's non-beneficial private speech, children who used less of the non-beneficial private speech were reported as less emotionally negative. Lastly, children's private speech and effortful control interacted to predict children's negative emotion. When children were low in effortful control they were high in negative emotion, regardless of how much non-beneficial private speech they used. However, children with higher levels of effortful control were reported as less negative when non-beneficial private speech was low. This research supports the importance of considering both cognitive and emotional development together, because private speech and emotion regulation interacted to predict children's negative emotionality. In addition, parents who support and encourage negative emotions may aid children's effortful control. This research further supports the importance of children's use of private speech in the classroom because non-beneficial private speech may be an additional cue for teachers and caregivers to know that a child needs assistance. / Ph. D.

This thesis investigates corrective-feedback episodes and learners?? private speech in Japanese language classrooms at a university to examine both overt and covert speech of the adult learners in relation to their target language learning. Corrective-feedback episodes between teachers and learners in language classrooms have been focused on as typical interactions in the classrooms and a factor that contributes to learning of target languages. Ohta (2001) found that learners noticed their teachers?? corrective feedback to the other learners and responded to the feedback in their private speech, and that they also repeated others or manipulated sounds or forms by using their private speech. As learners notice a gap between what they actually can produce and what they want to say, when they produce target languages, even without feedback (Swain, 1985; Swain and Lapkin, 1995), learners?? private speech should be examined as well as their corrective-feedback episodes in classrooms. The data were collected from six learners and two teachers at a Level 2 (upper beginning) Japanese course for two semesters (throughout a year). The data are composed of classroom observations, audio and video-recordings of the classrooms, and stimulated recall interviews with both the teachers and the learners following the classroom recordings. All corrective-feedback episodes and the learners?? private speech were transcribed and coded according to error type, corrective-feedback type, types of response to the feedback, and types of the learners?? private speech. The teachers tended to use recasts often because of the time limitation of the classroom teaching and their teaching policy. However, all the learners preferred to be given opportunities to self-correct their own errors before being provided with correct answers by recasts. Private speech had functions of cognitive/metacognitive, affective/social, and self-regulation, which overlapped with each other. The learners were aware of their use of private speech in the classrooms. The teachers sometimes noticed their learners?? use of private speech in the classes. The learners used both Japanese and English as cognitive tools as well as communicative tools. The learners used every opportunity for their learning, by overtly and covertly participating, in the class.

This thesis investigates corrective-feedback episodes and learners?? private speech in Japanese language classrooms at a university to examine both overt and covert speech of the adult learners in relation to their target language learning. Corrective-feedback episodes between teachers and learners in language classrooms have been focused on as typical interactions in the classrooms and a factor that contributes to learning of target languages. Ohta (2001) found that learners noticed their teachers?? corrective feedback to the other learners and responded to the feedback in their private speech, and that they also repeated others or manipulated sounds or forms by using their private speech. As learners notice a gap between what they actually can produce and what they want to say, when they produce target languages, even without feedback (Swain, 1985; Swain and Lapkin, 1995), learners?? private speech should be examined as well as their corrective-feedback episodes in classrooms. The data were collected from six learners and two teachers at a Level 2 (upper beginning) Japanese course for two semesters (throughout a year). The data are composed of classroom observations, audio and video-recordings of the classrooms, and stimulated recall interviews with both the teachers and the learners following the classroom recordings. All corrective-feedback episodes and the learners?? private speech were transcribed and coded according to error type, corrective-feedback type, types of response to the feedback, and types of the learners?? private speech. The teachers tended to use recasts often because of the time limitation of the classroom teaching and their teaching policy. However, all the learners preferred to be given opportunities to self-correct their own errors before being provided with correct answers by recasts. Private speech had functions of cognitive/metacognitive, affective/social, and self-regulation, which overlapped with each other. The learners were aware of their use of private speech in the classrooms. The teachers sometimes noticed their learners?? use of private speech in the classes. The learners used both Japanese and English as cognitive tools as well as communicative tools. The learners used every opportunity for their learning, by overtly and covertly participating, in the class.

The role of language has been identified as crucial in the cognitive development of young children, and has been observed on different time-scales. In particular, the real-time verbal mediation of behaviour has been studied in the context of private speech use and self-regulation, pioneered by Vygotsky and continued by others who followed this line of research. However previous studies have mainly attempted to find correlations between speech and self-regulatory behaviour, but have been unable to capture the dynamic and real-time temporal interactions between these phenomena. Hence, without being able to carry out a contextual analysis of the actual instances of temporal co-occurrence between speech and behaviour, correlational analysis is limited in determining the various kinds of verbal mediation that children spontaneously employ as strategies during problem-solving and while exercising self-regulation. The current study proposes ‘temporal pattern analysis’ as an effective method of extracting significantly recurring patterns of task-relevant speech and goal-directed behaviour, as they repeatedly occur in a stream of naturalistic behaviour which may also contain other temporally random events. These recurring temporal patterns are then contextually analysed, considering the pragmatic content of the speech involved and the goal-directedness of the behaviour towards a specific goal of the episode. Goal-directed episodes of behaviour in eight typically-developing preschool children were video-recorded during their self-initiated activities in the classroom as well as during a problem-solving task held in a laboratory setting. The proposed method of temporal and contextual analysis was used to examine the role of both private as well as social speech in the verbal mediation of self-regulatory behaviour during goal-attainment. A Contextual Model of Verbal Mediation was proposed in the study to account for the diverse functions that both social and private speech perform during verbal mediation of one’s own and others’ behaviour in a goal-directed setting, depending on the specific social and task-related context. A dynamic framework of assessment of performance was developed in the study, to account for both successful attempts at self-regulation as well as failures of self-regulation. The study also attempted to determine any consistent group differences in the styles of verbal mediation employed by the children, across the classroom and the laboratory settings.

A fala privada, de acordo com Wertsch (1980), é definida como um diálogo que o indivíduo promove consigo mesmo e sua função recai na necessidade da autorregulação, autodirecionamento e autorreflexão. Os estudos sobre fala privada de crianças e adultos foram pesquisados por McCafferty (1994), Berk & Spuhl (1995), Fernyhough & Russell (1997), Krafft & Berk (1998), Winsler, Carlton, Barry (2000), Manfra & Winsler (2006), Smith (2007), Day & Smith (2013), entre outros. Entretanto, o estudo da fala privada não foi investigado pelas pesquisas de Língua Estrangeira para Crianças (LEC) no Brasil. Dessa forma, essa pesquisa de mestrado se insere na lacuna existente na falta de estudos sobre a fala privada como uma importante ferramenta cognitiva no processo de ensino-aprendizagem da Língua Inglesa (LI). Nos estudos do LEC e de ensino-aprendizagem de língua estrangeira em geral, a língua é considerada somente uma fonte de comunicação. O propósito desse estudo foi verificar como a fala privada ocorre, quais suas funções e frequência. Para tanto, nove crianças entre quatro e cinco anos de diferentes nacionalidades e línguas maternas em uma escola internacional foram gravadas durante as atividades de Circle Time e Phonics. De acordo com os dados coletados, na análise quantitativa, cada fala foi classificada em fala privada ou fala social com o propósito de descobrir qual criança produziu mais fala privada. Na análise qualitativa havia a necessidade de considerar o ambiente social da crianças para descrever quando a fala privada ocorreu, sua função e frequência. Por exemplo, existem crianças que são expostas a três ou mais línguas estrangeiras ao mesmo tempo em casa e na escola, algumas somente falam em inglês na escola e português em casa e outras falam inglês e português na escola e em casa. Os resultados mostraram que a fala privada foi importante na promoção da autorregulação durante o processo de ensino-aprendizagem das crianças analisadas. Ela desempenhou um papel importante no engajamento das crianças quando estavam aprendendo os sons e as palavras na língua inglesa. Além disso, a fala privada demonstrou uma participação efetiva das crianças durante as atividades mesmo aparentemente não sendo ouvidas pelo professor. / Private speech, according to Wertsch (1980), is defined as a private dialog that the individual promotes with himself and its function lies in the necessity of self-regulation, self-guidance and self-reflection. Private speech of children and adults has been extensively studied by McCafferty (1994), Berk & Spuhl (1995), Fernyhough & Russell (1997), Krafft & Berk (1998), Winsler, Carlton, Barry (2000), Manfra & Winsler (2006), Smith (2007), Day & Smith (2013) and others. In Brazilian research, a gap could be identified regarding the study of private speech in English as a Foreign Langague for Children (LEC) as an important cognitive tool for the teaching-learning process. In these Brazilian studies, language is considered only a source for communication. The purpose of this study was to verify how private speech occured, what was its function and frequency. For this reason, nine children between four and five years old from different nationalities in an international school were voice and video recorded during the activities of Circle Time and Phonics. According to the data collected, in the quantitative analysis, each speech was classified as private speech or social speech in order to count which child produced more private speech. In the qualitative analysis there was the necessity to consider the childs environment in order to describe when private speech occured, its function and frequency. For instance, there are children that are exposed to three or more languages at the same time at home and at school, some only speak English at school and Brazilian Portuguese at home and others speak English and Brazilian Portuguese at home and at school. The findings of this study showed that private speech was important for promoting self-regulation in the teaching-learning process of the children analysed. It also played an important role in children engajament when learning the sounds and the words in English. Besides that, private speech showed an effective involvement of the children during the activities even though they were not heard, apparently, by the teacher.

A fala privada, de acordo com Wertsch (1980), é definida como um diálogo que o indivíduo promove consigo mesmo e sua função recai na necessidade da autorregulação, autodirecionamento e autorreflexão. Os estudos sobre fala privada de crianças e adultos foram pesquisados por McCafferty (1994), Berk & Spuhl (1995), Fernyhough & Russell (1997), Krafft & Berk (1998), Winsler, Carlton, Barry (2000), Manfra & Winsler (2006), Smith (2007), Day & Smith (2013), entre outros. Entretanto, o estudo da fala privada não foi investigado pelas pesquisas de Língua Estrangeira para Crianças (LEC) no Brasil. Dessa forma, essa pesquisa de mestrado se insere na lacuna existente na falta de estudos sobre a fala privada como uma importante ferramenta cognitiva no processo de ensino-aprendizagem da Língua Inglesa (LI). Nos estudos do LEC e de ensino-aprendizagem de língua estrangeira em geral, a língua é considerada somente uma fonte de comunicação. O propósito desse estudo foi verificar como a fala privada ocorre, quais suas funções e frequência. Para tanto, nove crianças entre quatro e cinco anos de diferentes nacionalidades e línguas maternas em uma escola internacional foram gravadas durante as atividades de Circle Time e Phonics. De acordo com os dados coletados, na análise quantitativa, cada fala foi classificada em fala privada ou fala social com o propósito de descobrir qual criança produziu mais fala privada. Na análise qualitativa havia a necessidade de considerar o ambiente social da crianças para descrever quando a fala privada ocorreu, sua função e frequência. Por exemplo, existem crianças que são expostas a três ou mais línguas estrangeiras ao mesmo tempo em casa e na escola, algumas somente falam em inglês na escola e português em casa e outras falam inglês e português na escola e em casa. Os resultados mostraram que a fala privada foi importante na promoção da autorregulação durante o processo de ensino-aprendizagem das crianças analisadas. Ela desempenhou um papel importante no engajamento das crianças quando estavam aprendendo os sons e as palavras na língua inglesa. Além disso, a fala privada demonstrou uma participação efetiva das crianças durante as atividades mesmo aparentemente não sendo ouvidas pelo professor. / Private speech, according to Wertsch (1980), is defined as a private dialog that the individual promotes with himself and its function lies in the necessity of self-regulation, self-guidance and self-reflection. Private speech of children and adults has been extensively studied by McCafferty (1994), Berk & Spuhl (1995), Fernyhough & Russell (1997), Krafft & Berk (1998), Winsler, Carlton, Barry (2000), Manfra & Winsler (2006), Smith (2007), Day & Smith (2013) and others. In Brazilian research, a gap could be identified regarding the study of private speech in English as a Foreign Langague for Children (LEC) as an important cognitive tool for the teaching-learning process. In these Brazilian studies, language is considered only a source for communication. The purpose of this study was to verify how private speech occured, what was its function and frequency. For this reason, nine children between four and five years old from different nationalities in an international school were voice and video recorded during the activities of Circle Time and Phonics. According to the data collected, in the quantitative analysis, each speech was classified as private speech or social speech in order to count which child produced more private speech. In the qualitative analysis there was the necessity to consider the childs environment in order to describe when private speech occured, its function and frequency. For instance, there are children that are exposed to three or more languages at the same time at home and at school, some only speak English at school and Brazilian Portuguese at home and others speak English and Brazilian Portuguese at home and at school. The findings of this study showed that private speech was important for promoting self-regulation in the teaching-learning process of the children analysed. It also played an important role in children engajament when learning the sounds and the words in English. Besides that, private speech showed an effective involvement of the children during the activities even though they were not heard, apparently, by the teacher.

Esta pesquisa busca investigar o papel da fala privada na aprendizagem de inglês como língua estrangeira, a partir da análise de seu uso por aprendizes adultos engajados em uma tarefa colaborativa. A base teórica norteadora desse estudo consiste em princípios da teoria sociocultural e de sua aplicação na aquisição de segunda língua (SL) e língua estrangeira (LE) conforme Vygotsky (1978, 1986, 1987), Lantolf (2000, 20006), Lantolf e Thorne (2000, 2006), Swain (2000), Smith (2007) e Lee (2008), entre outros. O estudo envolveu a aplicação da tarefa colaborativa "Quebra-cabeça" (de Swain e Lapkin, 2001) a sete duplas de aprendizes adultos de nível iniciante e pré-intermediário de inglês como LE, em um Curso Livre em extensão promovido por uma universidade federal. Nessa tarefa, as duplas deveriam construir uma narrativa, oralmente e por escrito, a partir de uma série de figuras sem ordem pré-determinada. Logo após a tarefa, houve uma entrevista com os participantes a fim de registrar suas percepções quanto à tarefa realizada, seu desempenho, e uso da fala privada. Além disso, aplicou-se um questionário para construir o perfil dos participantes enquanto aprendizes de LE. Uma semana após a tarefa, uma sessão reflexiva foi realizada, na qual as duplas puderam observar a sua produção oral e escrita por meio das gravações e do texto escrito e foram encorajadas a refletirem sobre a língua produzida e a fazerem reformulações. Os diálogos foram gravados em áudio e em vídeo, transcritos e analisados em busca de evidências de fala privada. Pergunta-se qual a natureza e função da fala privada no diálogo colaborativo e quais seus efeitos no processo auto-regulatório dos indivíduos. A análise dos dados sugere que a fala privada mediou a busca por auto-regulação na realização da tarefa, quando a natureza do diálogo foi colaborativa, promovendo ocasiões de aprendizagem. Esse estudo pretende contribuir para a elaboração de intervenções pedagógicas mais eficazes para a aprendizagem de línguas com a testagem de tarefas colaborativas que fomentem o uso da língua como processo e produto da aprendizagem, que se torna relevante para a realização de um evento comunicativo. / This research aims to investigate the role of private speech in English as a foreign language learning, based on the analysis of its use by adult learners engaged in a collaborative task. The theoretical approach this study follows comprises sociocultural theory principles and their application in the second and foreign language acquisition research, according to Vygotsky (1978, 1986, 1987), Lantolf (2000, 2006), Lantolf and Thorne (2000, 2006), Swain (2000), Smith (2007) and Lee (2008), among others. The study involved the production of the collaborative task "jigsaw" (Swain and Lapkin, 2001) by seven dyads of beginner and preintermediate adult English learners, in a private language course promoted by a Brazilian federal university. In this task, the dyads should construct oral and written narratives, based on a series of pictures with no pre-determined order. Soon after the task, an interview was taken with the participants in order to register their perceptions of the task itself, their performance, and the use of private speech. Furthermore, a questionnaire was applied to build the participants' profile as English learners. A week after the task, a reflexive section happened, in which the dyads could observe their oral and written production, and they were encouraged to reflect upon the language produced and make reformulations. The dialogues were audio and video recorded, transcribed and analysed in search of private speech evidence. The main research question focus on the nature and function of private speech in the collaborative dialogue and its effects in the learners' self-regulatory process. The data analysis suggests that private speech mediated the search for selfregulation in the task completion, when the nature of the dialogue was collaborative, promoting learning situations. This study intends to contribute to the elaboration of more effective pedagogic interventions for language learning based on collaborative tasks that foster language as a learning process and product.

Esta pesquisa busca investigar o papel da fala privada na aprendizagem de inglês como língua estrangeira, a partir da análise de seu uso por aprendizes adultos engajados em uma tarefa colaborativa. A base teórica norteadora desse estudo consiste em princípios da teoria sociocultural e de sua aplicação na aquisição de segunda língua (SL) e língua estrangeira (LE) conforme Vygotsky (1978, 1986, 1987), Lantolf (2000, 20006), Lantolf e Thorne (2000, 2006), Swain (2000), Smith (2007) e Lee (2008), entre outros. O estudo envolveu a aplicação da tarefa colaborativa "Quebra-cabeça" (de Swain e Lapkin, 2001) a sete duplas de aprendizes adultos de nível iniciante e pré-intermediário de inglês como LE, em um Curso Livre em extensão promovido por uma universidade federal. Nessa tarefa, as duplas deveriam construir uma narrativa, oralmente e por escrito, a partir de uma série de figuras sem ordem pré-determinada. Logo após a tarefa, houve uma entrevista com os participantes a fim de registrar suas percepções quanto à tarefa realizada, seu desempenho, e uso da fala privada. Além disso, aplicou-se um questionário para construir o perfil dos participantes enquanto aprendizes de LE. Uma semana após a tarefa, uma sessão reflexiva foi realizada, na qual as duplas puderam observar a sua produção oral e escrita por meio das gravações e do texto escrito e foram encorajadas a refletirem sobre a língua produzida e a fazerem reformulações. Os diálogos foram gravados em áudio e em vídeo, transcritos e analisados em busca de evidências de fala privada. Pergunta-se qual a natureza e função da fala privada no diálogo colaborativo e quais seus efeitos no processo auto-regulatório dos indivíduos. A análise dos dados sugere que a fala privada mediou a busca por auto-regulação na realização da tarefa, quando a natureza do diálogo foi colaborativa, promovendo ocasiões de aprendizagem. Esse estudo pretende contribuir para a elaboração de intervenções pedagógicas mais eficazes para a aprendizagem de línguas com a testagem de tarefas colaborativas que fomentem o uso da língua como processo e produto da aprendizagem, que se torna relevante para a realização de um evento comunicativo. / This research aims to investigate the role of private speech in English as a foreign language learning, based on the analysis of its use by adult learners engaged in a collaborative task. The theoretical approach this study follows comprises sociocultural theory principles and their application in the second and foreign language acquisition research, according to Vygotsky (1978, 1986, 1987), Lantolf (2000, 2006), Lantolf and Thorne (2000, 2006), Swain (2000), Smith (2007) and Lee (2008), among others. The study involved the production of the collaborative task "jigsaw" (Swain and Lapkin, 2001) by seven dyads of beginner and preintermediate adult English learners, in a private language course promoted by a Brazilian federal university. In this task, the dyads should construct oral and written narratives, based on a series of pictures with no pre-determined order. Soon after the task, an interview was taken with the participants in order to register their perceptions of the task itself, their performance, and the use of private speech. Furthermore, a questionnaire was applied to build the participants' profile as English learners. A week after the task, a reflexive section happened, in which the dyads could observe their oral and written production, and they were encouraged to reflect upon the language produced and make reformulations. The dialogues were audio and video recorded, transcribed and analysed in search of private speech evidence. The main research question focus on the nature and function of private speech in the collaborative dialogue and its effects in the learners' self-regulatory process. The data analysis suggests that private speech mediated the search for selfregulation in the task completion, when the nature of the dialogue was collaborative, promoting learning situations. This study intends to contribute to the elaboration of more effective pedagogic interventions for language learning based on collaborative tasks that foster language as a learning process and product.