A Survey Of Senior Middle School Students' Metacognition In EFL Writing

EFL writing has been paid an ardent attention among researchers both at home and abroad in recent years. As an important language productive skill, writing itself is also a complicated mental process. Many studies indicate that a successful EFL writer must possess abundant writing metacognition knowledge toward the writer himself/herself, the nature of the writing task, the strategies to attain the writing targets and so on, and he/she must be capable to set the writing aim as well as make evaluation on it.Metacognition is an important concept in cognitive psychology put forward by Flavell, concerning cognitive subject's knowledge of cognitive process, cognitive outcome and the related activities. Specially, it includes the cognition about the ongoing dynamic cognitive process, the static self-cognitive ability, the interaction of the two and the monitoring and controlling of these processes. It is consisted of metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience and metacognitive skill. Metacognition is the"cognition about cognition", a high-level cognitive activity. Once the learners have a good sense of metacognition, they will spontaneously make plans based on their own learning processes and targets, select properly the learning strategies, make monitoring and evaluation on the strategies as well as do the necessary changes on the plans.In the past thirty years or more since the concept of metacognition came into being, scholars at home and abroad have made abundant studies about the correlation between metacognition and second language acquisition. Since the 1990s, researches about metacognition in Chinese domestic scholars have been developing quickly. More and more researchers come to realize the importance of metacognition in foreign language learning and they apply the related theory to guide their teaching and research. Generally speaking, the research of metacognition at home is still in its infancy. Recently researches of EFL writing metacognition in our country mainly focus on the studies of college EFL writing metacognition and there are few studies of middle school students'EFL writing metacognition.The present study is carried out to solve the following four questions: (1) What is the correlation between metacognition proficiency and EFL writing performance of the senior middle school students? (2) What are the gender differences of EFL writing metacognition of senior middle school students? (3) What are the major differences related to EFL writing metacognition between successful and unsuccessful student writers? (4) What is the general situation of senior middle school students'metacognition proficiency in EFL writing? The population is the grade two students of four different senior middle schools from four different areas (Guilin District, Nanning District, Yulin District, Hezhou District) within Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The final valid sample includes 406 students from these schools. In each school, a liberal arts class and a science class are selected randomly.The instruments include questionnaire, English writing proficiency test and interviews. Data analysis involves quantitative analysis on the data collected by questionnaire by SPSS13.0 and qualitative classifying and summarizing of the outcomes of the interviews.Results of the survey show that students'writing performance has close relationship with their writing metacognition ability in the aspects of strategy of lexicon choosing and wording, strategy of placing equal stress on structure, content and language, analysis of the reasons for the lacking of writing ability and painful experience and evaluation of the reasons of writing progress.Correlation test also indicates that not all the metacognitive strategies and metacognitive evaluations have significant linear correlation with writing performance.There are significant differences between male and female students'EFL writing metacognition on the aspects of strategy of lexicon choosing, wording, exercising, revising, asking for help and checking of the words and sentences, evaluation of the standard and function of writing, views of writing teaching and analysis of the reasons for the lacking of writing ability and painful experience. Metacognition differences between successful and unsuccessful writer are significant on the factors of strategy of lexicon choosing and wording, strategy of placing equal stress on structure, content and language, strategy of exercising, revising and asking for help, analysis of the reasons for the lacking of writing ability and painful experience and evaluation of the reasons of writing progress. In general, students that were investigated have no a high level of EFL writing metacognition.Results of the present study are significant to EFL teaching, especially to senior middle school EFL writing teaching. In EFL writing teaching, strengthening students'EFL writing metacognition knowledge and making EFL writing metacognition training to the students can help them develop a more reflective and spontaneous EFL learning method, so as to improve students'learning level and ability.