Abstract
Effective English writing has long been a challenge in English language teaching. With the development of cognitive psychology, metacognition has drawn more and more researchers’ attention and provides a new perspective for EFL writing. Metacognitive theory mainly includes metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategy. Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill which includes planning, monitoring and evaluating. Once learners have a good command of metacognitive strategy, they will become more independent and autonomous and will be more capable of planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning process and thus become efficient learners.However, the study of metacognitive strategies-based writing instruction for vocational college students has been neglected for the past years. The author, therefore, carried out an empirical study to investigate the effect of metacognitive strategy training on students’ writing performance in the hope of finding an optimal teaching approach for English teachers of vocational colleges. This teaching approach really embodies the teaching idea “student-centered” and is targeted to foster students’ metacognitive strategy, monitoring and evaluating abilities in English writing.
Highlights
Literature ReviewMetacognitive strategy is a term used in information-processing theory to indicate an “executive” function and it refers to the strategy that is used by learners as the means to manage, monitor and evaluate their learning activities
The subject samples were randomly chosen from the students of the year of 2008 who consisted of 86 first-year non-English majors from two natural classes in Laiwu Vocational College. (This kind of Sample-Choosing is called Cluster Sampling according to Statistics.) One class of 44 students with 36 females and 8 males comprised the experimental group; another class of 42 students with 33 females and 9 males served as a control group
In the context of the deficiency of vocational college students’ writing ability and the significance of metacognitive strategy, the author carried out a study of metacognitive strategies-based writing instruction for Vocational College Students in an authentic EFL classroom setting for one semester based on CALLA mode with combinations of metagonitive strategies and cognitive strategies
Summary
Metacognitive strategy is a term used in information-processing theory to indicate an “executive” function and it refers to the strategy that is used by learners as the means to manage, monitor and evaluate their learning activities. O'Malley and Chamot's (2001:8) definition for metacognitive strategies is that “metacognitive strategies involve thinking about the learning process, planning for learning, and self-evaluation after the learning activity has been completed”. O'Malley and Chamot (2001) concluded that metacognitive strategies involve thinking about the learning process, planning for learning, monitoring the learning tasks, and evaluating how one has learned. The type, self-monitoring involves checking, verifying or correcting one’s comprehension or performance in the course of the language task. They are: (1) Production evaluation; (2) Performance evaluation; (3) Ability evaluation; (4) Strategy evaluation and (5) Language evaluation
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