Topic: English for Specific Purposes | The relationship and predictive power of metacognitive writing strategies and critical thinking
Presenter: Abdelakher Sarwat Madany
Presentation details
This study will investigate the relationship and predictive power of metacognitive writing strategies and critical thinking on the measures of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF) in academic writing performance. While metacognition has been extensively studied in language domains such as listening, reading, vocabulary, speaking and writing, no research has simultaneously examined how metacognition and critical thinking together influence CAF measures of academic writing, leaving a critical gap in understanding the interplay between cognitive and linguistic processes in writing.
Hence, this correlational study will employ convenience sampling to recruit 200 students from a private university in Lebanon. Data will be collected using: The Metacognitive Academic Writing Strategies Questionnaire (MAWSQ) to assess metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation, The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (W-GCTA) to measure inference, assumption recognition, deduction, interpretation of information, and argument evaluation, and CAF analysis of students’ argumentative essays (ie syntactic complexity, error-free clauses, clauses per T-unit). Pearson’s correlations will be employed to examine relationships between metacognition, critical thinking, and CAF measures. And multiple regression will determine the extent to which metacognition and critical thinking predict CAF measures in academic writing.
Findings of this study will advance theoretical understanding of how cognitive processes underlying writing, including metacognition and critical thinking, shape linguistic performance and provide implementable findings for educators to design writing interventions targeting these skills.
About the presenter
Abdelakher is a master’s student in TEFL at the American University of Beirut, and has been working as a research assistant at the same university. His research interests centre on the role of metacognition in academic reading and writing.
At present he is writing a thesis which seeks to advance the field of metacognition in the Middle East. He has also designed workshops around Lebanon for university instructors teaching them how to integrate metacognition into writing curricula.