Tertiary-Level Students’ English Writing Performance and Metacognitive Awareness: A Group Metacognitive Support Perspective

Recent research has highlighted the role of group metacognitive guidance in English writing. The present study was to examine 120 Chinese students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) participating in two different group metacognitive support methods for a college writing course—group feedback guidance (GFG) and self-explanation guidance (SEG)—compared with a control group (CG) not receiving metacognitive guidance. This study explored the effects of each method on participants’ writing, transfer ability, and metacognitive awareness. The results indicate that GFG learners demonstrated the highest mean scores on all measures, followed by SEG learners and CG learners. Qualitative data collected from journal entries show that GFG learners tend to exhibit different metacognitive regulation processes, display a high level of task perception, and develop an awareness and use of metacognitive strategies. Discussions and implications based on these findings are compared to studies conducted in Nordic countries.