Dr. Walaiporn Chaya
Western Languages Department, Faculty of Humanities, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand

Making Metacognitive Strategies Visible:
Helping EFL Students to Revise the First Draft of Argumentative Essays

Helping EFL writers to become aware of metacognitive strategies in the writing process is crucial. Incorporating metacognitive strategies into the writing process will allow student writers to exert more control over the writing process and to achieve the goal of writing in a way that improves writing performance without waiting for others’ help. Revision is a cognitive and goal-oriented process that requires the higher order of metacognitive ability to cope with the sub-processes of revision by setting goal and is significant partly because under certain circumstance it leads to improvement in the quality of final written work. This demonstration then will illustrate how metacognitive strategies can be applied explicitly in the revision process. This workshop will also demonstrate the model of metacognitive strategy training which combines planning strategies, monitoring strategies and evaluating strategies in revising the first draft of an argumentative essay.

First, in the planning stage, to revise for better content and ideas of the whole essay (global revision), a Plan Revision Think Sheet is applied so that the students can identify their problems from the first draft and analyze specific revision tasks (e.g. revise for the purpose and audience). The students then set the revision goal and choose the revision strategies (e.g. prior knowledge related to the components of a good argumentative essay and linguistic knowledge) appropriate for the revision task. In the second stage, the students are trained to identify how to apply and modify the prior knowledge of revising strategies to the revision task. Self Revision Think Sheet is provided to make self-monitoring of revising strategies visible and to see the relationship of the effort the students put and their revision task performance. Once the revision task is carried out in an appropriate sequence, the revision process proceeds. To ensure that the students perform successfully, a Self Evaluation Checklist is employed in the final stage. Finally, they decide whether the revision goal is achieved. By incorporating metacognitive strategies in the revision task, the student writers can learn how to use such strategies, when and why to apply the strategies, as a result, learn to regulate their cognitive processes in a way that directly improve their writing performance.

Presenter
Walaiporn Chaya is currently an instructor of English in the Western Languages Department, Faculty of Humanities, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand. She obtained her Ph.D in English Language Studies in the co-supervision programme between Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand and Washington State University, USA. She teaches undergraduate writing courses and graduate courses including research writing, research in English studies and topics of language and English studies. Her main interests include research in ELT, language learning strategies, metacognitive strategies in reading and writing as well as academic reading and writing.