A Study Of Metacognitive-Strategies-Based Writing Instruction

Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill which involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate the learning process. Once having a good command of metacognitive strategies, students are able to assess the situation, to plan, to select appropriate strategies, to coordinate them, to monitor or evaluate their effectiveness and to revise the plan when necessary.So far, research in language learning strategies has pointed to the powerful role of metacognition in language learning, and the potential for greater use of metacognitive strategies. However, little has been reported about metacognitive-strategies-based instruction, especially in writing, one of the production skills crucial to students' internalization of linguistic knowledge. This research had important implications for EFL instruction because developing English language writing competence presents a major challenge to non-English majors who have limited language environment and inadequate metacognitive awareness. A pilot investigation into metacognitive awareness among 515 freshmen of our University showed that 66% of the respondents were literally unaware of the components of the overall experience of language learning. Many of them expected that the instructor would make learning happen and assume responsibility for clarifying learning goals and monitoring learning process. Noticeably, this inadequacy of metacognitive awareness was typical of those students who did unsatisfactorily in both the MNET examination and the university placement test. This accounted for the fact that poor autonomy would lead to poor language proficiency.This study reports a one-year metacognitive-strategies-based writing instruction program for 35 non-English major freshmen at Guangdong University of Technology in an attempt to cultivate learner autonomy and encourage students to manage their own studies. We bore the hypothesis that to lay a stress on writing could facilitate both the internalization of linguistic knowledge and the all-round development of language skills. The study, with a training package of metacognitive and writing cognitive strategies throughout an intensified practice of both guided and free writing, researched into four aspects: the effects of the training on students' metacognitive awareness; the effects of the training on actual writing performance; the potential positive effects of the training on language proficiency improvement; the differences relating to metacognitive strategies between good and poor writers. This program adopted an embedded metacognitive strategy model, which consisted of four parts: developing students' metacognitive awareness; planning and arranging learning; monitoring learning behaviors; evaluating writingperformance. First of all, students were taught to have a better idea of metacognition, what is involved in learning writing, and the correlation between strategy learning and language learning. In light of the notion that the combination of metacognitive and cognitive strategies would achieve better results, both cognitive and metacognitive strategies of writing were explicitly trained with the three-step approach: presentation of strategies; cued practice; evaluation. The effects of monitoring were reinforced through self-evaluation, peer evaluation and teacher evaluation, which were used to assess the results of decisions made during a writing task, allowing students to evaluate their ongoing learning and take necessary remedial actions by reviewing difficulties and justifying choices. In addition, after familiarizing with what is involved in learning, students were helped to first plan and arrange their learning at the beginning of the term, and then check and revise the plans at mid-term, since setting goals and objectives promoted students to know where they were going, focus their attention on learning process, choose appropriate strategies to learn and seek various practice opportunities. And the teacher...