Teaching Metacognition to Foster Students’ Writing Proficiency

Abstract

The present study seeks to investigate first-year written expression teachers’ at the Ecole Normale Supérieure-Assia Djebbar of Constantine views and perceptions about the role of strategies-based instruction when explicitly embedded into the writing tasks in developing foreign language students’ writing proficiency. A questionnaire is used to elicit data and to answer the following research questions: How do teachers perceive the importance of the pre-writing strategies related to the writing activity? Moreover, to what extent would training students to use planning strategies improve their writing proficiency? The results from this quantitative study indicate teachers’ awareness of how important it is to train students to use pre-writing strategies to empower their metacognitive awareness and improve their writing processes, skills, and knowledge.