Metacognitive Awareness and Academic Motivation: A Cross-Sectional Study in Teacher Education Context of Turkey

Abstract

Metacognitive awareness has been shown to have a significant role in second or foreign language (L2) learning (Anderson, 2002, Ohata and Fukao, 2014, ÿz, 2015). The present study investigated the role that metacognitive awareness plays in the enhancement of academic motivation among prospective English teachers in a Turkish context. A total of 104 students participated in the study. Data were collected using the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI; Schraw & Dennison, 1994) and the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS; Vallerand et al., 1992). Findings showed a statistically significant relationship between metacognitive awareness and academic motivation. The analysis of moment structures (AMOS) and multiple squared correlations revealed that knowledge of cognition (KOC) and regulation of cognition (ROC) as the two major components of metacognitive awareness appeared as significant predictors of academic motivation, explaining 44% of the variance in the academic motivation of prospective English teachers. These findings underscore the importance of metacognitive awareness, and fostering construction of new knowledge, regulating and monitoring cognition would contribute to the creation of a supportive environment for promoting academic motivation among students, more specifically in teacher education programs. It is further concluded that metacognitive training can motivate students to improve their metacognitive knowledge and strategy use in learning an L2.