Scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognition: Insights from an L2 doctoral research writing course

Abstract

This study investigates how genre knowledge and metacognition can be scaffolded in a genrebased course for doctoral students engaged in writing research articles. We argue that current definitions of genre knowledge development encompass the development of metacognition, and thus adopt an inter-disciplinary approach to illustrate how metacognition-specifically metacognitive knowledge-can be scaffolded in the genre classroom. We developed two tasks for this purpose. In the first, students were asked to describe their writing context and genres. For the second task, at the end of the course, students submitted a visual conceptualization of the research genres in their specific scientific community. This visualization was accompanied by an account of students' observations about genre, and a reflection on how these insights could be applied to their ongoing writing situation. Students were also interviewed two to six months after the course to explore how they reported using genre knowledge in their writing. Results showed that the metacognitive tasks elicited an integrated view of genre and encouraged students' conceptualization of this knowledge as a tool for writing. In interviews, students reported using facets of genre knowledge metacognitively in their writing, by describing how they engage with reader expectations, conventions, variation, and the possibility of strategic deliberate choices.

Online Course Design and Materials Development for Teaching Reading of Research Articles to Efl Undergraduate Students at a Greek Technical University

“…The experimental online course was constructed on the university's Moodle platform and included fifteen separate online labs. The course design was theoretically underpinned by the concept of metacognitive genre awareness (Negretti 2012;2017;Negretti, & Kuteeva 2011;Negretti & McGrath 2018;Yeh 2014) which combines the theories of ESP school genre analysis (Swales 1990; and metacognition (Flavell 1979).…”

“…ESP school genre-based tasks (Swales 1990; can facilitate novices' reading of newly encountered academic genres by raising "their rhetorical consciousness" (Swales 1990: p.213), although recent findings suggest their effectiveness both in reading and writing RAs largely depends on whether they are underpinned by the theory of metacognition (Negretti, & Kuteeva 2011). Other than Negretti & Kuteeva (2011), whose study focused on second-year pre-service English teachers, previous works on integrating the theories of genre and metacognition have focused on developing postgraduate students' RA academic writing abilities within traditional courses and have mainly investigated the effectiveness of specific interventions, rather than reflecting on course design and material development (Negretti 2012;2017;Negretti & McGrath 2018;Yeh 2014). Works that have focused on genre analysis and online materials development for specific disciplines (Chang & Kuo 2011;Stoller & Robinson 2013) have also targeted RA academic writing of advanced learners.…”

Hidden expectations: scaffolding subject specialists’ genre knowledge of the assignments they set

“…Our study adopts an inter-disciplinary approach, drawing on theories of genre (Tardy 2009;Swales 1990) and metacognition (Flavell 1979) to construct a scaffolded professional development activity for subject specialists with two aims: building genre knowledge, and scaffolding metacognitive awareness of how genre knowledge has a bearing on pedagogical practices. By combining theories of genre and metacognition in task development (Negretti and McGrath 2018), we are able to elicit subject specialists' tacit knowledge and support them in gaining awareness of their own expectations and misalignments in their practice. The findings show that genre theory can help subject specialists build an understanding of academic literacy, while metacognitive training provides an opportunity to articulate and reflect upon their tacit disciplinary knowledge and practice, ultimately enabling them to apply their insights to courses.…”

Socially-shared Metacognitive Regulation Episodes Between Undergraduate Engineering Students During a Collaborative Genre Analysis Task in an English for Academic Purposes Course

“…Developing such a "consciousness" or "flexibility" however, essentially implies metacognitive ability which should also be purposefully scaffolded by providing students with repeated opportunities to practice genre analysis, get feedback, reflect on their performance and practice again (Devitt, 2015). In fact, genre-analysis tasks appear to be more effective when underpinned by traditional metacognitive scaffolds such as reflective journals, reflective matrixes and reflective accounts, concept mapping (Negretti & Kuteeva, 2011;Negretti & McGrath, 2018) or other typical metacognitive heuristics and prompts such as summarization and recall largely because these tasks push learners to explicate and verbalize what they think they know or do not know about a certain genre concept (Johns, 2015).…”

“…This paper describes a qualitative investigation of how and when social forms of metacognition emerge during a wiki-based collaborative genre analysis task within an experimental English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course that aimed to teach 2 nd year Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) undergraduate students at the Technical University of Crete, Greece how to search and read research articles online . Related literature suggests EAP courses integrating genre-based tasks from the ESP school such as Swalesian move analysis (1990), can to a certain extent facilitate EFL novices' reading and/or writing of newly encountered academic genres, yet their effectiveness largely depends on whether they are underpinned by the theory of metacognition (Negretti & Kuteeva, 2011;Negretti & McGrath, 2018;Yeh, 2014). Nevertheless, existing metacognitive genre-based research is scarce and has solely focused on the development of individual metacognitive genre awareness, that is, it views metacognition as an internal cognitive process, ignoring the emergence of metacognition at the social plane.…”