Application Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In College English Writing Instruction

EFL (English as a foreign language) writing is a great challenge for Chinese college students. As far as the college students and the teachers are concerned, EFL writing is relatively difficult compared with the other four basic skills. Thus, many questions and discussions emerge concerning EFL writing and teacher’s instruction. To improve EFL writing instruction, teachers and researchers have studied and introduced many methodological options. As for the approaches of writing, the two widely used ways are process-oriented and product-oriented method, but they cannot solve some problems in writing. Thus, how to help students overcome difficulties in EFL writing and how to teach College English writing effectively has been a practical issue to the teachers.In the recent decades, several learning theories have been brought in, one of which is metacognition. The concept of metacognition was introduced in the1970s. Then, the theory has been brought in the foreign language teaching and learning. Many empirical studies have proved that metacognition has a great influence on EFL teaching practice. Prior studies also have proved that student’s EFL proficiency can be enhanced by means of metacognitive strategy training. However, such empirical studies on how to apply the metacognitive strategy in College English writing instruction are comparatively few.According to the previous studies, this thesis attempts to investigate the metacognition based EFL teaching approach, in order to improve the students’ writing proficiencies. The author tries to practice the metacognitive theory into this empirical study for one term which mainly probes into the following aspects. Firstly, the status quo of college students’ metacognition in EFL writing; secondly, whether there are differences among different levels of writers in terms of EFL writing metacognition; thirdly, what effects will metacognitive strategy training have on the students’EFL writing proficiency?The57students (non-English majors) from two normal classes of the same major in Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province were involved in the study. The two classes are divided into the experimental group and the control group randomly. Generally speaking, there are three steps in the research:in the first step, all the students from EG and CG participate in answering the questionnaire and the pre-training EFL writing test, in order to understand the students’situation of metacognitive competence in EFL writing and their writing proficiencies; in the second step, the students received the metacognitive strategy writing training and traditional writing teaching in EG and CG respectively. Besides that, the students in EG and CG are both asked to write untimed compositions after class, but students of the EG are required to keep learning diaries; in the third step, all of the students in EG and CG are required to take part in the post-training timed writing test. Some of the students in EG are invited to the face-to-face interviews randomly. What is more, learning diaries are selected according to the author’s criteria to analyze the data.The results of the study show that metacognition has a positive influence on the students’writing proficiency; metacognitive strategy training is an effective way to improve the students’writing proficiency.