Metacognitive Schemes as a Tool for Teaching English to Young Learners: Psychological Discourse

The article presents the results of a theoretical and empirical analysis of the problem of optimizing teaching English to students of primary school age, taking into account the requirements of the modern information society. It was stated that training should format an active approach to modeling the knowledge and competencies of students. This position of the authors allows us to consider thinking in a foreign language as the goal of learning and an indicator of the degree of language proficiency. As a research problem, the authors considered an attempt to evaluate the heuristic and developing resource of metacognitive schemes in the logic of projective-recursive technology for teaching English to primary school children. The authors present the results of a study of the dominant type of thinking of primary school students as an indicative construct of metacognitive development. It is proved that younger students are mostly characterized by sign and symbolic thinking; this confirms the possibility of using metacognitive schemes in teaching English to children of this age group. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the practical experience of using metacognitive schemes in the practice of teaching English to primary school children at the Educational Centre «Interclass» (Kryvyi Rih). This technique involves the construction of a mental denotative graph that performs the function of sense formation and mental interpretations modeling in the students' minds. The obtained results complement the materials presented by scientists regarding the trends in teaching English to primary school children using a resource of metacognitive schemes.