Abstract
The present study explored metacognitive strategies employed by English as second language (ESL) writers. The study also investigated students’ awareness of the effectiveness of these strategies and the relationship between students’ language proficiency levels and the frequent uses of metacognitive strategies. The data was collected via a questionnaire completed by non-native English speaker students (23 males, 38 females) at a midwestern university in the United States. The findings indicated that students frequently employed the three components of metacognitive strategies (i.e., monitoring, planning, evaluating; where evaluating was the most frequent strategy, followed by monitoring and planning). Moreover, the results indicated that students had a relatively high awareness of the effectiveness of the strategies discussed in the study which consequently affected students’ uses of these strategies during a writing task, such as essays. Among the students, there was a positive correlation between students’ proficiency levels and the frequency of the use of strategies. The study suggested several pedagogical implications including the need for increasing students’ as well as teachers’ awareness of metacognitive strategies in teaching and learning academic writing.
Highlights
Writing plays important roles in academic success; especially, writing in a second language (L2) which is considered highly complex
The present study explored metacognitive strategies employed by English as second language (ESL) writers
The mean of overall metacognitive strategy use was 3.62 out of 5.0, which may be considered as high strategy use according to Oxford (1990) classification of means method
Summary
Writing plays important roles in academic success; especially, writing in a second language (L2) which is considered highly complex. L2 writing involves multiple interactions at different levels (i.e. cognitive, affective, social, and metacognitive). L2 writing involves interactions between internal factors (e.g., first language (L1) writing abilities) and external factors (e.g., guidance of writing tasks, audience) (Hyland, 2003; Wang & Han, 2017). According to Devine (1993), a successful learner is “one who has ample metacognitive knowledge about the self as learner, about the nature of the cognitive task at hand, and about appropriate strategies for achieving cognitive goals” (p.109). It has been found that the learners’ awareness and strategic knowledge about learning play a critical role in those activities (Zhang, 2010)
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