Metacognitive Strategy

This study was aimed at investigating the effect of collaborative assessment, as compared to that of static assessment, on the EFL learners’ reading comprehension, metacognitive strategies, and critical thinking. In this mixed-methods research design study, 62 intermediate EFL learners out of a population of 79 English language learners, were randomly selected and divided into two groups of experimental and control with 31 participants in each group. They were both female and male, who were administered a meta-cognitive strategy and critical thinking questionnaire and a reading comprehension test at the pretest and posttest stage of the study. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants and six sessions of the course were picked for observation. A multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) test was run and the obtained results revealed that the students in the experimental group showed statistically significant gains on the reading comprehension and metacognitive strategy as compared with the participants in the control group but did not show any significant difference on their critical thinking. Similarly, the analysis of the interviews and classroom observations provided important themes which revealed that the students found collaborative assessment a very fruitful and practical way of promoting their reading skills and strategies mainly metacognitive strategies.

Research has shown that writing skill of Iranian learners is not at a satisfactory level. One of the ways to develop writing ability is improving strategic behavior of learners. The current study set out to compare writing performances and patterns of using metacognitive strategies in bilinguals and monolinguals as well as senior and freshmen students. A total of 176 English major university students took part in the study (88 bilinguals and 88 monolinguals). Data were collected through three instruments: a background questionnaire, a writing metacognitive strategy questionnaire, and participants’ compositions. A two-way factorial ANOVA was used to analyze the data obtained through the strategy questionnaire. Since the composition data were not parametric two Kruskall-Wallis tests were employed for data analysis. The results revealed that bilinguals used more metacognitive strategies and had higher writing scores than monolinguals. In addition, seniors had better writing performance than freshmen while the difference between them in using strategies was not significant. Based on the results it can be concluded that teaching writing metacognitive strategies may result in better writing performance.

This study aimed to investigate the effects of scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ academic writing skills. The initial population was 100 EFL students from M.A. English language teaching (ELT) students who took academic writing course at Islamic Azad University, Tehran and Alborz branches. To homogenize the sample, Oxford placement test (OPT) was administered, and based on its results, 75 advanced learners were selected for the purpose of the study. After that, they were divided into 3 groups, namely the experimental group A (scaffolding genre knowledge), the experimental group B (metacognitive strategy use), and the control group. IELTS academic writing task 2 was administered as the pretest and posttest. The treatments lasted for 16 sessions. To explore the learners’ perceptions regarding the instructions qualitatively, the semi-structured individual interviews were administered to 20 students who were chosen from the experimental groups. The results showed that scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use had significant impacts on the Iranian EFL learners’ academic writing skill. In addition, the findings indicated that there was a significant difference between the effects of scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on the Iranian EFL academic writing skill in which scaffolding genre knowledge had more significant effects on Iranian EFL academic writing skill than metacognitive strategy use. Furthermore, the qualitative findings showed that the learners adopted positive views towards scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use in developing their academic writing skill.