A Study Of The Correlation Between Metacognitive Knowledge And Writing Achievements Of English Majors

In recent years, a large quantity of studies have been done on ESL (English as second language) students' English writing at home and abroad. They believed that a good English writer should be a person who has sufficient knowledge of English writing metacognition, a person who can set the writing goal and evaluate it automatically (Jiang 2007).Metacognition could help students go over their study, their past achievements and shortcomings, and provide guidelines for learning goals. In western countries, English metacognition studies mainly focused on ESL students while students in our country are EFL (English as foreign language).In light of the theory of metacognition and studies on English writing metacognitive knowledge both at home and abroad, the author proposes the following two research questions: 1) What is the current status of English majors' metacognitive knowledge in writing? 2) What is the relationship between metacognitive knowledge and writing achievements of the English majors?Research participants in this study are 172 freshmen and 162 juniors of English majors in Tianjin University of Science and Technology. In the beginning, an English writing metacognitive knowledge questionnaire is handed out to the students, and 330 valid questionnaires are collected. In order to have a cross-examination of the results from the questionnaire, an interview is performed to some of the students. In the end, combined with students' achievements in English writing, software SPSS 19.0 is used to analyze the collected data. Results show that:1) General status of English majors' metacognitive knowledge in writing is not at a high level. Among them, person knowledge is at a relatively high status while level of strategy knowledge is relatively low. In addition, there is significant difference in person knowledge between freshmen and juniors of English majors, while no significant difference in strategy knowledge and task knowledge.2) There is a positive correlative relationship between metacognitive knowledge and writing achievements of English majors (P=0.283) even though the coefficient is not very high. To be mentioned, the correlation coefficient between strategy knowledge and writing achievements is higher than the other two variables (person knowledge and task knowledge)in metacognitive knowledge. With regard to strategy knowledge, the correlation between planning strategy and writing achievements is the highest. Reflecting strategy is at the second place while monitoring and formulating strategies are of low correlations.The results could help English majors have a better understanding of their metacognitive knowledge in writing. In addition, this study provides an empirical evidence for English writing teaching, hoping that can shed some light on pedagogical problems.