An Investigation Into Grade Characteristics Of Senior Middle School Students' Metacognition In Efl Writing

Metacognition is firstly defined by Flavell (1979: 906) as the"knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena". Many Second Language Acquisition researchers have found that metacognition is one of the important factors that can affect the process and outcome of language learning (Brown, 1984, 1987; Paris, 1990; Garner, 1994; Wenden, 1987, 2001; O'Malley & Chamot, 2001). Undertaken from the view of metacognition, the studies of specific language skills'learning process, like writing, enrich the theories of Second Language Acquisition and provide implications to the instruction of corresponding language skills.However, the previous studies on metacognition in EFL writing mostly take college students as the population, and focus on college English writing instruction; while the situation of senior middle school students'metacognition in EFL writing seldom involved. Besides, the main study purpose of them is to clarify the relationship between metacognition with writing proficiency; while little study has been done to investigate the specific developmental characteristics of students'EFL writing metacognition (Jiang Yingjie, 2007: 76; 171).The present study, under the framework of EFL writing metacognition (Wu Hongyun, 2006), attempted to investigate the developmental characteristics of senior middle school students'EFL writing metacognition along with the grade by posing the following three research questions: (1) what is the general situation of Chinese senior middle school students'metacognition in EFL writing?; (2) what are the differences in EFL writing metacognition and its three components with the students from Grade One, Grade Two, and Grade Three?; (3) is there any difference between Liberal Arts students and Science students in their separate developmental characteristics of EFL writing metacognition with the three grades? A cross-sectional method was used to examine the differences with the students from Grade One, Grade Two, and Grade Three. By simple random sampling, a liberal arts class and a science class were chosen from each of the three grades in Xingtai No.3 Senior Middle School; and finally 319 students from six nature classes in total were chosen as the subjects. The data were collected by the instrument"EFL Writing Metacognition Questionnaire for Senior Middle School Students"; and then analyzed with SPSS 16.0. using descriptive statistics, One-way ANOVA, and Univariate ANOVA.The results revealed that the general level of senior middle school students'EFL writing metacognition was not high; in particular, their assessment of writing problems and the use of revising strategy were quite low. There was a developmental trend with the grade in senior middle school students'EFL writing metacognition; the differences in assessment of writing problems and metacognitive writing strategies with the three graders were significant, while the differences in assessment of writing task between the second graders and the third graders was not significant. This developmental trend existed both for liberal arts students and science students, but liberal arts students were at a significant higher level than that of science students, especially in the use of metacognitive writing strategy.These findings provide practical pedagogical implications to EFL writing instruction for senior middle school students. The instruction aimed to improve senior middle school students'EFL writing metacognition should begin in their first year; and students of science classes need to get more attention in EFL writing metacognitive instruction; the assessment of writing problems and the use of metacognitive writing strategies should be stressed. Students should be guided to hold a learning method with more reflective and autonomous features.