The Role of Teacher Regulatory Talk in Students’ Self-Regulation Development Across Cultures

Abstract

This study is the first to explore the contribution of different types of teacher regulatory talk—directive, guiding, and autonomy supportive talk—in children's development of self‐regulation across cultures. Teacher‐to‐student talk was analyzed under naturalistic conditions in eight Year 4 classrooms, all situated in different primary schools in England (student N = 25) and Chile (N = 24). Self‐regulation was studied by observing students’ effective metacognitive monitoring (awareness of errors) and effective metacognitive control (effective control of problems) in a series of 11–13 cube assembly tasks. Mann–Whitney U tests showed that English participants demonstrated higher levels of effective metacognitive monitoring and control, and participating teachers a similar level of teacher regulatory talk across cultures. The function that regulatory talk had in predicting students’ self‐regulation, however, tended to vary according to culture. OLS multiple regressions revealed that while guiding talk had the same positive effect across cultures, directive talk had a negative effect in England but null effect in Chile, and autonomy supportive talk had a positive effect in Chile but negative in England. These results indicate that it would be valuable to explore further the culturally adaptive functionality of teacher talk for students’ self‐regulation development.

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