Teaching Metacognitive Strategies In English Writing

Writing is one of the four basic abilities of language. The other three arelistening, speaking and reading. A number of studies have shown that writing scores areclosely related to whether or not the students have adopted certain writing strategies.Since the90’s of the last century, writing strategies, especially metacognitive strategiesin writing have drawn much attention from researchers. Many studies show thatmetacognitive strategy training has a very positive effect on the learners of Englishwriting. However, there are different views on the concept and structure ofmetacognition, and based on those views, different training models are set up. Most ofwhich are proposed for English major students, few for high schools in general, nonefor the high schools in urban rural border area.In order to help the senior high school students there improve their writingability, teachers should enable them to develop metacognitive strategies in writing. Theauthor of this thesis offers a special training mode based on the existing training models.My mode is intended to bring out the metacognitive strategies in writing on the learners’part, in an eight-week experiment. Subjects involved in the study were74students ingrade1of a senior high school, divided into experimental group and control group andtaught by the same English teacher. Questionnaires were used and writing scores werereferred to in the study. The training procedures consisted of in-class instruction andafter-class instruction. For in-class instruction, students were required to learn to usemetacognitive strategies based on the theme composition; for after-class instruction,students were guided by the teacher to understand the concept of metacognition bydoing the task. Data obtained from the questionnaires were processed with SPSS12.0.Data from interviews were transcribed, classified and analyzed. The study shows thatthe training of metacognitive strategies is useful in terms of the improvement oflearners’ writing proficiency. However, we also find that for the teacher to help studentsemploy the metacognitive strategies in a short time is really a tough task, more effortsand time should be made to involve the students in critical thinking about their writing process.