An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Writing Strategy Instruction For English Majors In Higher Vocational College

The concept metacognition has attracted great attention in the psychological field aswell as other related disciplines since it was first put forward by the Americanpsychologist J. H. Flavell in the1970s. Many researchers and scholars have contributed toits conceptual constructions, while others are concerned about the development andapplication research of metacognition. Of the research on metacognition theory, it iswidely accepted that metacognition theory entails metacognitive knowledge andmetacognitive strategy. The latter is the focus of the study. As is defined, metacognitivestrategy is "higher order executive skills that may entail planning for, monitoring, orevaluating the success of a learning activity"(Brown et al,1983). Therefore, we speculatethat students who have good command of metacognitive strategy may better manage theirstudies.During the last few decades, there has been a marked shift in EFL writing teachingtowards the needs of individual learner. Some researchers proposed that teachers andstudents should revisit the writing ability from metacognitive perspective, formetacognitive strategies can be used to affect the course and outcome of writing and helpstudents take more responsibility for their own writing. Generally speaking, EMIHVC areregarded as comparatively limited English writing proficient students. They are lesseffective in applying writing strategies to perform writing tasks and less successful indeveloping to be independent writer. Unfortunately, there is no systematic and intensiveempirical study regarding effects of metacognition writing strategy instruction on writingproficiency which is conducted for English majors in vocational college. Thus, theresearcher is determined to undertake an empirical study as to the efficacy ofmetacognitive writing strategy instruction on their writing proficiency.Participants of this study are55English majors in Qinhuangdao Vocational andTechnological College: one intact class (24females and3males) as EG, the other (24females and4males) as comparison group. The metacognitive writing strategy instructionwas integrated into the regular writing curriculum. In EG, students received combined instruction on metacognitive writing strategy and writing strategy, while in CG, studentsreceived instruction on writing strategy. The present researcher taught the students in EGand CG. The two groups shared the same text book on writing, and the same Englishwriting syllabus. This study attempts to explore the following specific questions:(1) Whatis the present situation of EMIHVC applying metacognitive writing strategy?(2) Ismetacognitive writing strategy training beneficial to the increasing of their metacognitiveawareness?(3) Does metacognitive writing strategy training have effects on their writingproficiency?(4) What impact does metacognitive writing strategy training have onstudents at different writing proficiency levels?The data are collected from pretest and posttest and then analyzed. As is shown bythe results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, English majors in high vocationalcollege are little aware of using metacognitive writing strategy in their writing, andmetacognitive writing strategy instruction does contribute to raise their metacognitiveawareness and improve their writing performance. In addition, the results also provide uswith the suggestion that the training is more helpful for students at high writingproficiency level than students at medium and low writing proficiency level. Enlightenedby the result of the study, we take pedagogical implications into consideration, and thenoffer the suggestions for future research on metacognitive writing instruction and Englishwriting teaching.