Immediate and delayed effects of embedded metacognitive instruction on Chinese EFL students’ English writing and regulation of cognition

Abstract

Writing can be viewed as a recursive process that involves both cognitive and metacognitive processes. Recent research has highlighted the importance of metacognition in the improvement of English writing. Metacognition is found to be facilitated through collaborative activities. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of cooperative training strategies in enhancing students’ metacognitive skills and therefore their English writing. Towards this, two distinct settings for cooperative training, different in terms of embedded metacognitive instructions, were explored. The embedded metacognitive instructions were developed in line with the IMPROVE method. A total of 120 Chinese university students taking a writing course participated in this study. They were divided equally into three groups that were learning writing under distinct circumstances—a cooperative learning condition with embedded metacognitive instructions (COOP+META), a cooperative learning condition (COOP), and a non-treatment control group. Results indicated that the COOP+META condition yielded the highest mean scores in writing and regulation of cognition, followed by the COOP condition and the control group. In addition, IMPROVE students exhibited different kinds of cognitive regulation processes. However, no significant improvement was noticed in the knowledge about cognition. Interviews conducted at the end of the intervention further corroborated these findings. In last, the theoretical and educational implications of this study are discussed.