Metacognitive awareness of EFL student writers in a Chinese ELT context

Abstract

This paper reports on an investigation into metacognitive awareness of Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) student writers, under a threefold metacognition framework – person, task, and strategy variables, and within the broader domain of cognitive writing theories. Data were collected in a Chinese tertiary English language teaching (ELT) context through small-group interviews with 51 English-major students prior to an English writing course. Findings show that motivation, self-efficacy, and writing anxiety constitute students’ awareness of person variables influencing their EFL writing, whereas their task awareness involves task purposes, task constraints, and cross-language task interference. Strategy awareness of planning, text generating, and revising was found typical of novice EFL student writers. The paper proposes an interactional model of EFL student writers’ metacognitive awareness that intends to describe and explain the intertwining nature of the complex process underlying their EFL writing.

Keywords:

• metacognitive awareness
• L2 writing
• Chinese student writers
• Chinese ELT context
• metacognition
• EFL

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhoulin Ruan

Zhoulin Ruan is associate professor of applied linguistics in the Department of English, Culture and Communication at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China. His research interests include metacognition and self-regulated language learning, second language writing, English for specific purposes (ESP) in the Chinese context, and discourse analysis.