Teaching meta-cognition, or any other meta-skill, demands the deliberate deployment of two venerable teaching methods. Both are fundamental, especially in the literacy classroom. One is scaffolding and the other is modelling. To scaffold learning, teachers must make explicit, and go on making explicit, the frameworks of meta-cognition and the need deliberately to build and then invoke them - the need to step backwards; to reach peace of mind; to engender confidence in one’s own abilities, experience and common sense and to deploy these; to take a deliberately wide, overall view; to invoke general theory; to consider related issues; to recall similar instances and compare them with present issues; to think generally about situational structure; to critique the present and particular presentation of issues; to consider an author’s putative purpose and read in the light of it and so on and so on. The need deliberately to do such general, proactive, critical and enquiring thinking about thinking or reading must be made explicit repeatedly - as we have seen, these are not innate mental habits and do not transfer well into new situations.

To model critical awareness when reading students need to see it in action. It must be made obvious that the teacher actually uses such meta-cognition in real life, that it is a genuinely useful, and used, set of techniques. Where a problem or issue is addressed the teacher must demonstrate her thinking aloud, must show how she uses meta-techniques herself when addressing issues or solving problems. Critical reading would be a perfect opportunity for such modelling. As a reading is approached and carried out a teacher can actively model the meta-linguistic questions and ideas she keeps actively running in her mind before and while reading. She can provide a commentary of her thinking. She can overtly show that she routinely interrogates text at the meta-linguistic level and is alert to agenda, immediate purpose and wider ambition.

Meta-affect: Meta-thinking can be applied to our affective lives, too: To our emotional responses, our attitudes and expectations and our motivations. Students in ABE often have searing histories of savage personal trauma experienced through the very public humiliation of failure to ‘catch’ literacy, in school and at home, day after day, from a tiny age and over many years. The pain of inability to master the educational system’s first, and apparently lowest, hurdle is greater then you might think. Once secondary school is reached, enrolment in the remedial class may also have been a deeply bitter experience. Sexy it isn’t. Students use strong and purple words like ‘the remo’s’, ‘thick’, ‘hopeless’, ‘stupid’, ‘boring’, ‘total demoralisation’, ‘despair’, ‘completely pointless’, ‘absolutely impossible’, ‘humiliation’ and even ‘terror’ when talking about their past experiences of literacy, tests and school in general. ‘Bunking off’, or even less appropriate behaviour, may have been their response. Such a student’s painful feelings of incompetence and worthlessness, or worse, can be palpable in the ABE environment half a lifetime later.

Coming back to education, and literacy, can lead a student, sometimes without warning, up intense and noisesome emotional blind alleys where further increments of self-esteem may be lost and confidence may be further shredded. Grown-up people, bus drivers, check-out ladies, welders, parents, may suddenly weep. Such hurtful recollections may be destructive; this is, though, not inevitable and they can even point a way towards progress. A student who has learned to understand something of how and why literacy may affect him emotionally, who understands something of his history and where his dark responses arise from and who understands something of how to manage such emotional reactions, becomes more the manager, and less the victim, of literacy. This understanding and adaptation of attitude and response may be addressed quite independently of the acquisition of the literacy skills themselves. This is meta-affect and can, in some instances, be as important as any other aspect of literacy tuition. It is a matter of becoming aware of potential emotional traps, their probable origin, what triggers precipitate emotional responses and some technique for managing them when they detonate.