Self-monitoring

This study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic EFL learners’ composition writing. Fifty female students studying English at Navid English Institute in Shiraz, Iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. They were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of English who were divided into two control and experimental groups and took a writing pre-test. The experimental group (EG) received a training program on the effective use of the technique of self-monitoring proposed by Charles (1990). That is, they learned to add annotations expressing doubts and queries on various parts of their five composition drafts. The students in CG wrote their drafts without annotations. At the end of the twenty-second session course, both groups took a writing posttest. The results indicated that the learners in EG performed significantly better and the global features of organization and content in their writing were enhanced. Surveying the students’ views on self-monitoring, through a questionnaire, revealed their interest in taking charge of their writing task. Findings point to the efficacy of the self-monitoring technique in promoting learners’ writing proficiency and autonomy in handling writing tasks.

The self-monitoring technique, using the learners’ annotations and teacher’s response as its base, proved to be one of the beneficial alternatives for the traditional teacher feedback. Although some studies have been done on the effects of self-monitoring technique, more studies are still required to place this tactic at the forefront of educational practices. This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ annotations in terms of their form and content. To this end, after homogenizing the participants, 30 university students were selected and received essay writing instruction employing the self-monitoring technique for eight sessions. The learners’ annotations were gathered and classified in terms of their content and form based on the frameworks established by Sarabia, Nicolás, and Larioss (2012) and Storch and Tapper (1996) respectively. The research results, as for the content of the annotations, evinced that the largest number of annotations fell into the categories of lexis and syntax, and to a lesser extent the discourse organization. Regarding the form of the annotations, most of the learners’ annotations fell into the category of “a demand for the correction of an L2 form”. The results of the chi-square test also showed that the difference in the content and use of language forms of annotations used by students was significant. Hence, the use of self-monitoring technique in writing courses brings a wealth of information regarding the writing content and problematic areas for both the teacher and learners as they can have discussions over the written text, making the process of writing more interactive.