The use of metacognitive strategies to foster descriptive writing in english

Abstract

This paper presents the results from a mixed- method study that examined the writing practices and difficulties of undergraduate students in a Colombian university. In answering the research question, the process-genre approach was adopted to lead the pedagogical intervention, concerning three metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, controlling, and evaluating) to support the writing of descriptive paragraphs. A first phase included the application of the metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI) research instrument, in order to diagnose the existence of learners’ metacognitive strategies. The participants were 17 A2 learners aged 18-22. A second phase included the implementation of two tasks to validate learners’ writing performance through the process-genre approach, whereby the collected data was analyzed following grounded theory procedures. The findings of this study revealed that students perform better in writing when they are aware of their learning process and undertake the use of metacognitive strategies such as planning, monitoring, controlling and evaluating to regulate their cognition, while reconceptualizing writing from a non-traditional product-based view to a dynamic coconstructed practice.