The longitudinal development of second language writers’ metacognitive genre awareness

Abstract

Recently, scholars have begun to adopt metacognition theory as a lens for understanding how learners’ genre awareness develops over time. However, many of such studies have tended to focus on contexts involving applied linguistics training programs or English for Academic Purposes rather than professional contexts where writers are learning non-academic genres. Adopting a longitudinal case study design, the researcher investigated this issue by following six L2 English students as they learned to write a professional legal genre called the office memorandum as a part of their legal education program. Using metacognition theory as a lens, the researcher examined the focal students’ emerging metacognitive genre awareness, the domains in which they developed that awareness, and finally, how that awareness differed among individual students. Findings show that despite receiving the same classroom input, the students’ acquisition of genre knowledge was non-linear, with some learners’ developmental trajectories differing substantially both in terms of their reported awareness of the genre (i.e., metacognitive knowledge) and how they reported using that awareness when writing (i.e., metacognitive regulation). These findings are discussed in relation to future research and classroom pedagogy.