A Study Of Proficiency On College Students’ EFL Writing Based On Metacognitive Knowledge

Writing is a process for the subject to express his/her opinions on a given topic,and it is a relatively complex process comparing with listening and reading. It is also areflection of one’s mastery of language. For the college students, English writing isinevitable. But how to get a high score and how to write a good composition is bigobstacle in their English study. Teaching programs of each edition keep on stressingthe importance of the four basic skills of language study: listening, speaking, readingand writing, and at the same time the importance of writing attracts more and moreattention. Teaching Program of College English (1985/1986) divides the requirementsinto three levels. The first is to cultivate learners’ reading ability; the second is to trainthe learners to listen and translate; the third is to write and speak. It also asks for thestudents’ ability to write a text of100to120words within half an hour. TeachingProgram of College English (revised edition,1999) puts listening, speaking, readingand writing on a same level, but it still views that reading was the most important skillin SLA. It requires the students to write a text of120to150words in half an hour.College English Curriculum Requirements (on trail,2004) aims at developingstudents’ comprehensive English applied ability, and it changes the leading role ofreading. The number of words increases by30words once again. In the CEF-4andCET-6, the score rate of writing is15%, which is15. It means that the students arequalified in this part if their scores are or more than9. From the statistics collectedfrom the CET-4and CET-6, it is not satisfactory. As for the approaches of writing, themost popular two ways are process-oriented and product-oriented method. Althoughthe two ways of writing are used widely, they cannot solve some problems in writing.Therefore, how to write effectively has been a concern of the teachers and thestudents.Early in the1950s, studies of cognition began. Cognition is a process for thesubject to learn and know the world. After that, meta-came into being, such as meta-memory, meta-language. In the1970s, an American psychologist Flavellbrought meta-into cognition and proposed metacognition. Metacognition has gotgreat concern by scholars abroad and at home since1970s, and it also has become ahot topic in the field of educational psychology and cognition. Metacognition can besimply defined as “cognition of cognition”. It is an activity in which cognitive subjectgets to know, experiences, evaluates and regulates one’s own cognitive activities. Thiskind of cognitive experience promotes cognitive subject to regulate their cognitiveactivities actively. Metacognition includes two aspects simultaneously. One is thecognition of one’s self-cognition ability, which is static; the other is cognition of theon-going cognitive process, which is dynamic. Scholars abroad and at home havedifferent opinions toward the components of metacognition. Foreign scholars mainlyhold the opinion that metacognition has two subcategories, Flavell, Brown, Oxford,Nelson and Narens are the representatives. Scholars at home support thethree-division of metacognition, which includes metacognitive knowledge,metacognitive experience and metacognitive skills.Since1980s, domestic scholars have brought metacognition into the study ofsecond language education. With the gradual up-level of writing in second languageacquisition, there are more and more scholars beginning to study the relationshipbetween metacognition and EFL writing. Wu Hongyun and Liu Runqing conducted aresearch on the factor analysis of metacognition, Jiang Yingjie and Li Guang studiedthe general features of non-English majors’ metacognition in writing. But researchersat home and abroad mainly focus on the metacognitive strategies in EFL writing,including functions and training of metacognitive strategies and the number of studieson metacognitive knowledge in EFL writing is very small. Therefore, an empiricalstudy to investigate the role of metacognitive knowledge in college students’ Englishwriting and how to improve college students’ EFL writing proficiency from theperspective of metacognitive knowledge was conducted by the author of this thesis.This research is conducted based on theoretical analysis and empirical study,which involves questionnaire (before and after the training), strategy training, writingtests (before and after the teaching) and free answer. The participants (58students) of this study are non-English majors from two normal classes in a college of Tianjin. Theresearch lasts for18weeks. The two classes are divided into experimental group andcontrol group randomly, with29students in every class. The experimental groupreceives training on metacognitive knowledge in writing, and the control group getstraditional EFL writing training. There are three steps in the study: firstly, all theparticipants take part in answering the questionnaire and pre-test writing; secondly,teach the experimental and control group respectively; thirdly, conduct post-testwriting, questionnaire and free answer.This thesis goes around the following three research questions.1) What is the relationship between the level of Chinese non-English majors’metacognitive knowledge and the proficiency of their EFL writing?2) How can the teacher enrich Chinese non-English majors’ metacognitiveknowledge by training?3) What may be the implications to EFL teaching in writing?Through the experiment lasting for18weeks, the data collected show that:1)students’ metacognition level is low, and it is necessary for the teacher to conductmetacognitive training;2) the results of writing show that both the experimental andcontrol group improve, but the experimental group’s improvement is more evident;3)it shows that students’ metacognition is positively related to their EFL writing;4)some students from the experimental group transfer metacognitive knowledge to otherlearning task after the metacognitive training.There have been researches on metacognition in EFL writing, but the researchesat home mainly focus on the influence of metacognitive strategies, and there are a fewstudies on the function of metacognitive knowledge in EFL writing. This study startsfrom the knowing of students’ metacognition, and intends to improve students’ EFLwriting by metacognitive training. This study may help the students elevate their levelof EFL writing by their monitoring and regulating in their writing process. It is alsohoped that the students who get training on metacognitive knowledge can positivelytransfer the metacognitive knowledge in their learning in other aspects, and then makethem become better learners.