Self-regulation in L2 oral narrative tasks performed by adult Korean users of English

When second language (L2) users experience difficulty in performing a task in English, they often engage in efforts to overcome their difficulties through strategic behaviors aimed at achieving the goals of the task. If those efforts take the form of, or are accompanied by, verbal expressions, these verbal expressions are often referred to as private speech, and their function described as selfregulatory, by second language researchers taking a Vygotskyan perspective. In this study, these claims were inspected and re-defined by linking a Vygotskyan perspective on self-regulation with a metacognitive perspective. Eight Korean graduate students enrolled in a U.S. university participated in this study. They were videotaped as they performed two narrative tasks, one using a series of pictures that had no words and a second, a recall task in which they watched a movie clip and retold the story they had seen. They were also interviewed as they watched their narrative performance. During the interview, they provided their thoughts on using English and on engaging in self-regulatory behaviors. Their utterances and gestures in the narrative tasks were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The interviews were recorded, partially transcribed, and analyzed. Results and discussion included the finding of support for previous studies that L2 users’ private speech functions as a self-regulatory process and plays an important role in the process. There were also findings that revealed limitations in explaining L2 users’ self-regulatory behaviors from a simple Vygotskyan conception of private speech. Several theoretical concepts from a more general metacognitive perspective, including aspects that refer to contextualization and frame, were effective in explaining the social context in which L2 self-regulatory behaviors occur. Theoretical and practical implications of the results of this study and possible future research topics are also addressed.