The relationship between students' metacognitive writing awareness and writing performance

Abstract EN

Writing in a foreign language involves a particular attention that requires the management and supervision of one's cognitive processes.

This paper examines the relationship between the metacognitive writing awareness of second year students of English at the Teacher Training School of Constantine and their writing performance.

After accomplishing a writing task, participants' metacognitive writing awareness was assessed through an open-ended questionnaire.

The students' scores in writing were correlated to the depth of their post-writing metacognitive reflection; besides, the latter was analyzed to detect the metacognitive sub-components experienced and verbalized by skilled writers and to compare them to the ones of less skilled writers.

The findings revealed a positive correlation between writing proficiency and metacognitive awareness; moreover, skilled writers displayed a more frequent use of the metacognitive sub-components than less skilled writers.