An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In The Vocational College English Writing Instruction

The term metacognition was put forward by Flavell, an American psychologist, in the 1970s. Metacognition theory consists of two parts: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies. The latter is the focus of this study. Metacognition was originally a psychological concept, but now has been widely applied to other disciplines, especially second language acquisition (SLA). According to O'Malley & Chamot (1990), metacognitive strategies include planning, monitoring and evaluation strategies. Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategies are considered as higher-order executive skills which can promote successful language learning to a great extent. Students who have a good command of metacognitive strategies tend to learn autonomously.Writing is a very important language skill students should acquire during their English study. It is a kind of productive skill. Writing can reflect learners' overall mastery of English language well. Unfortunately, writing has always been the weakest aspect for college English test takers (Li Sen, 2000). Therefore how to improve students' writing ability has become one of the critical problems in college English teaching.Over the past twenty years more and more research has been done on metacognitive strategies at home and abroad. However, compared with the research on other learning strategies, the research on metacognitive strategies is still in the underway stage. Furthermore, the research on metacognitive strategy training is quite lacking. So far there have been no reports on the results of long-term metacognitive strategy training intended for vocational college English learners.The present research aims to construct a metacognitive strategy training program for English learners in vocational college, and to further probe the effectiveness of the training on students' English writing proficiency.The researcher carried out a survey on 37 vocational college students (34 females and 3 males), by using a metacognitive writing strategy questionnaire (MWSQ), which is designed by following the definition and classification of metacognitive strategies from O'Malley & Chamot (1990), and intends to combine metacognitive strategies with writing strategies. At the same time, all the students were required to take a writing test. The results of the survey show that vocational level students seldom used metacognitive writing strategies in their writing learning. Based on the results, the researcher conducted a one-semester metacognitive strategy training program with the 37 students by applying a modified training model of O'Malley & Chamot's CALLA model. After the training, the same MWSQ questionnaire and a metacognitive strategy training effect questionnaire (MSTEQ) were administered to the students. A writing test with the similar topic as the previous one was held. The results of data analysis show that the training can enhance students' metacognitive strategy use frequency, contribute to their metacognitive awareness, and further improve their writing performance. The results also indicate that the training has different impacts on students of different English writing proficiency. The training is more helpful to the less successful writers than the comparatively successful ones.In light of the results of the research, pedagogical implications for metacognitive strategy training and English writing teaching are discussed. The limitations of this research and corresponding suggestions for further research on the relative topic are also included so as to promote future metacognitive strategy training and improve English writing teaching and learning.