Effects of Metacognitive Writing Strategies on Students’ Expository Paragraph Writing Performance and Writing Dispositions
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: Although metacognitive strategy has been viewed as one of the 21st century essential skills that improves writing performance and behavior, there are several controversies of theories and inconsistencies of empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of this strategy. This study employed a unified model that examined the effect of a comprehensive educational package covering three general and 18 specific metacognitive strategies on EFL students’ expository paragraph writing performance and dispositions. To this end, a pretest-posttest non-equivalent comparison group quasi-experimental design was adopted. The participants were intact first-year accounting (control group) and economics (experimental group) students (60 in each group) enrolled in Communicative English course at the University of Gondar. Writing tests, questionnaires and semi-structured interview were used and analyzed via One-way MANCOVA, One-way Univariate ANCOVA and thematic analysis respectively. The study revealed that the overall effect of the strategies on the combined dependent variables was statistically significant (P < .001, partial η² =.291). Test results also showed that a statistically significant difference between the study groups (p <.001, partial η² =.284), indicating that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the expository paragraph writing posttest after controlling for baseline differences. However, the intervention did not show a significant effect on students’ writing dispositions (P >.05, partial η²=.004). These findings were also supported by the qualitative data. This implies that EFL teachers should incorporate metacognitive writing strategies-self-planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation- into their EFL writing classes.
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
Funders: Strong, University of Gondar
OpenAlex ID: W7166707339