Rokhsareh Kakvand, Somayeh Nourazar & Dr. Elham Mohammadi
University of Zanjan, Iran
Metacognition is the ability of one’s mental consciousness process. Research has showed metacognitive learners tend to be the most successful learners. They take conscious steps to understand what they are doing. The present study is an attempt to examine the influence of scaffolded instruction on metacognition and the performance of Iranian EFL learners on IELTS writing task 1. To this aim, eighty intermediate students including both genders of males and females were selected. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: Forty students with twenty-five female and fifteen male students formed the control group, and the other forty students with twenty-two female and eighteen male students formed the experimental group. To get a benchmark of the participants’ writing skill in the current study, ELTS writing task 1 was administered as the pre-test. Then, Metacognitive Awareness Writing Questionnaire (MAWQ) was distributed among the students to get an understanding of their initial metacognitive awareness of writing. For four weeks and each week 6 hours, the learners received scaffolded metacognitive instruction. The purpose was to promote the metacognitive awareness of students for writing essays through explicit instruction and scaffolded techniques. Lastly, another IELTS writing task 1 was assigned as the post-test to measure the students gain as a result of taking part in the instruction on writing metacognitive strategies. In order to check the effectiveness of instruction the aforementioned questionnaire was administered for the second time. The results of paired-sample t-test indicated that increasing participants’ awareness of metacognitive strategies leads to the improvement of their writing scores on the post-test.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Third International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 31 January-1February 2019 , Ahwaz.
