| Author: | Xu, Wandong |
| Title: | Metacognitive strategy use in Chinese (L1) and English (L2) writing : a within-subject comparison |
| Advisors: | Zhu, Xinhua (CBS) Chan, Shui-duen (CBS) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Subject: | English language -- Writing Chinese language -- Writing Metacognition English language -- Study and teaching -- Chinese speakers Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies |
| Pages: | 244 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Writing is characterized by a dynamic and multifaceted nature, making it a highly sophisticated and demanding language skill. As such, learners must exert significant effort and time to develop writing proficiency no matter in which language context. Successful completion of writing tasks requires not only writers’ processing and orchestration of different types of knowledge under individual and contextual constraints but also their active and purposeful management of these endeavours. Metacognitive strategies are a set of mental operations that enable learners to direct, oversee, and regulate their cognitive processes and behaviours. The existing literature has consistently recognized the significant role that metacognition plays in the learning process. However, there is a lack of studies that focus on students’ metacognitive strategic use in test-situated writing and its role in final writing performance. Furthermore, Chinese university students might not be metacognitively competent enough to exert effective control over their thinking and behaviours related to writing particularly in the context of an L2 after years of exam-oriented and teacher-centered classroom instruction. Given that writing abilities have always been seen as essential for university students to succeed academically and professionally, this thesis aims to probe into writing metacognitive strategies with an expanded participant pool, including participants from different disciplinary majors and with diverse levels of L2 proficiency. It is also important to note that a large learner population of native Chinese speakers is also learning English as their L2 in mainland China. Previous studies on learners’ strategic processes have been conducted in either an L1 context or an L2 context. However, researchers in this vein have rarely based their empirical investigations on a cross-linguistic approach via the within-subject comparison. Therefore, in addition to investigating what kinds of metacognitive strategies Chinese university students employ to undertake the assigned writing tasks, this thesis also compared such strategy use across L1 and L2 settings. Taking the participants’ academic major and L2 proficiency level into analysis, it attempts to advance our understanding of the complex L1-L2 transfer mechanism underlying writing, thus further testing Cummins’ linguistic interdependence hypothesis (LIH) and the common underlying proficiency (CUP) from a new arena of metacognitive strategies. More specifically, this thesis seeks to examine the main categories of metacognitive strategies, the factorial structure among these categories of metacognitive strategies, the effects of using such strategies on final writing scores, as well as the transfer possibility of metacognitive strategies across L1 and L2 writing contexts. The former two research questions were addressed in the development and validation procedure of writing metacognitive strategy questionnaires in L1 and L2 contexts respectively. Multiple data collection methods, including focus-group interviews, literature reference, researcher judgment, teacher comment, and student feedback, were reliably applied to conceptualise and build the initial scale of metacognitive strategies in L1 and L2 writing contexts. What followed were statistical factor analyses on questionnaire datasets to reveal the extracted common factors of metacognitive strategies and confirm the factorial structure among them. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (hereafter EFA and CFA) results showed that the participants utilized five main types of metacognitive strategies when accomplishing the assigned writing tasks (i.e., task interpreting, planning, linguistic monitoring, non-linguistic monitoring, and evaluating), and these strategies were interacted but distinct from each other to support the hierarchical construct of metacognitive regulation in real time, which works across L1 and L2 writing contexts. Deep insights into the two research questions were also derived from post-task interview responses. These results collectively contributed to refining the theoretical conceptualisation and operationalisation of metacognitive strategies in writing by addressing some of the blurriness and confusion inherent in the definition and categorisation of this construct to a certain extent. Followed is the mixed-methods investigation into the contribution of metacognitive strategy use on writing performance and the availability of L1-L2 transfer of such metacognitive skills, combining quantitative analyses of questionnaire responses and writing scores and qualitative analyses of interview data. The results of structural equation modelling (hereafter SEM) confirmed that metacognitive strategy use was a determinant factor of writing performance in both L1 and L2 contexts. In particular, the predictive effects of metacognitive strategies were relatively more robust on L2 writing performance than L1 writing performance. However, a careful inspection of correlation and regression results revealed a mixed picture in which not all the extracted factors of metacognitive strategies were significant contributors to final writing performance. Besides, SEM results supported the L1-L2 transfer of metacognitive strategies in the writing domain. There was also a cross-language facilitation effect of L1 writing metacognitive strategies on L2 writing performance, which was mediated by L2 writing metacognitive strategies. Finally, SEM multigroup analysis failed to identify the statistically significant moderation effect of L2 proficiency and academic major on the observed L1-L2 transfer of writing metacognitive strategies, but the path coefficients were found to be different between higher- and lower-L2 proficiency groups as well as between English major and non-English major groups. Results obtained in this thesis are extensively discussed to offer theoretical and pedagogical implications in the writing domain. Limitations are also acknowledged critically to suggest directions for researchers to conduct further research to move this field forward. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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