1. Investigating the Metacognitive Awareness and Strategies of English-Majored University Student Writers.
- Author
-
You, Yu-Ling and Joe, Shih-Guey
- Abstract
This study investigated the metacognitive knowledge, especially declarative and procedural knowledge, of Taiwanese university students who majored in English and were considered skilled writers. Researchers examined their metacognitive processes and writing strategies using introspective interviews that highlighted the following: their experiences in writing English composition, what they knew about English composition, how they wrote a paragraph in English, what they did when assigned a topic to write about in English, what they did when they ran out of ideas while composing, and what they did after they finished writing a composition. Before the interviews, participants wrote an English composition on a topic presented to them by the researcher. The study examined five types of declarative knowledge and the procedural knowledge for planning and revising based on analysis of interview transcriptions. The students possessed the metacognitive knowledge and strategies needed to write well. First, they underwent a recursive writing process. They were metacognitively aware of the declarative knowledge of topic familiarity, self-awareness of strength or weakness, rhetoric conventions, coherence and continuity, audience awareness, and many others. They were capable of making good use of their metacognitive procedural knowledge (brainstorming, organizing, outlining, pausing-to-think, reviewing, and revising) to fulfill the requirements of good writing. (Contains 19 references.) (SM)
- Published
- 2001