ELT students’ metacognitive writing strategies

Abstract

Academic Writing is one of the writing courses that are required for students majoring in an English education program, where students can have firsthand experience in making use of the language that they have learned in order to compose an academic text. The difficulty of making these academic texts using a second or foreign language requires effective use of metacognitive writing strategies. However, students’ use of these strategies did not all produce the expected positive result. This study aimed to find out the kind of metacognitive writing strategies that Academic Writing students use and how these strategies affected their writing. The participants of this study were nineteen Academic Writing students at a university in Central Java. The data were collected qualitatively by using mixed questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to get in-depth information from the participants. The findings found that the participants made use of all the strategies at different rates. Each participant produced different writing outcomes due to the differences in metacognitive awareness and personal preferences in writing. The findings in this study also reflected the positive outcome from making use of metacognitive writing strategies on overcoming the participants’ shortcomings in writing. Other findings, such as participants’ perceptions on metacognitive writing strategies and how they preferred to learn metacognitive writing strategies based on their experiences would also be found in this study.