Metacognitive-Strategies-Based English Writing Teaching

The focus of teaching has been changed recently from teaching students knowledge to developing their ability to study. As a teacher, our main task is to cultivate their ability of autonomy.Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive one which involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, to monitor and to evaluate the learning process. If students have a good command of metacognitive strategies, they will be able to plan, to select appropriate strategies, to coordinate them, to monitor, to evaluate their learning effectiveness and to revise the plan when necessary.Writing has an important role in English teaching and learning. However, it is the weakest one among the language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. In order to change the present situation, I have applied the metacognitive strategies into English writing in this study and it was successful.This study reports a three-month metacognitive-strategy-based writing instruction program for 37 non-English major students at Changjiang Engineering vocational college in an attempt to cultivate learner autonomy and to encourage them to manage their own studies. Three questions were discussed in the study: 1) How much have the professional college students known about the metacognitive strategies? 2) Can metacognitive strategies training enhance students' metacognitive awareness? 3) Can metacognitive-strategy-based writing instruction improve students' writing ability?Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis have shown that 1) the vocational college students know little about metacognitive strategies; 2) metacognive strategies training has notable effect on enhancing students' metacognitive awareness; 3) However, metacognitive-strategy-based writing instruction may not necessary improve students' English writing ability.The study shows that metacognive strategies training do have a potential effect on developing students' ability to control and evaluate their study. The study implicates that the training has a positive role in applying metacognive strategies to students' learning.