The Influence Of Metacognitive Knowledge On L2 Collaboratie Writing

As a writing mode,collaborative writing(CW)has recently attracted more and more attention in the field of second language acquisition.In recent years,metacognition has provided a new perspective for understanding learners’ CW process.However,few studies have focused on learners’ CW process from the perspective of metacognitive knowledge,or systematically explored the influence of metacognitive knowledge on the interaction patterns,language-related episodes(LREs)and writing texts produced in CW.The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of metacognitive knowledge of CW on the interaction patterns,LREs and writing texts of L2 learners during CW.This study is an experimental research.The participants of the study are 58second-year English majors from Liaoning province.They were divided into experimental group and control group,30 of whom were in the experimental group who got training about CW and 28 in the control group who got no training.Participants in both two groups worked in pairs to conduct online CW.The recordings of each pair’s talks in the process of online CW,the reflective journals,semi-structured interview and the co-written texts constituted all source of data,which were collected and analyzed to find out the influence of learners’ metacognitive knowledge of CW on the interaction patterns,LREs,and text quality in online CW.The major findings of this research are as follows.Firstly,learners’ metacognitive knowledge of CW has an impact on the interactive patterns formed in the process of CW.This study found that the experimental group and the control group showed four different interaction patterns,which were: collaborative,dominant/dominant,dominant/passive and expert/novice.The experimental group produced significantly more collaborative patterns than the control group.Secondly,learners’ metacognitive knowledge of CW has an impact on the LREs produced in CW.The experimental group produced more accurate LREs during the interaction.However,there was little difference in output types.Lexical-based LRES(L-LREs)were the largest output quantity in the experimental group and the control group,while Form-based LREs(F-LRES)were the least.Finally,learners’ metacognitive knowledge of CW has no significant effect on the quality of co-conducted writing texts in terms of CAF.Based on the above findings,this study provides instructive significance for EFL writing teachers in classroom practice.When arranging writing tasks,teachers can encourage learners to try to conduct CW,and promote more cooperative patterns by training learners on CW,so as to produce better writing texts.In addition,this study points out the shortcomings of the research and provides a reference for the future development of this research field.