Metacognitive Activities in ESL Teaching

video cited here

In the field of ESL, metacognitive activities are usually used when teaching ESL students reading skills. Through designed instructional activities, L2 learners are encouraged to engage in metacognitive thinking. When reading in target language, they monitor the reading strategies they use and compare them with those of peers. In this way, they become aware of not only the advantages and disadvantages of different reading strategies but also when and where certain one should be applied. Then they figure out how to improve and remedy their own.

However, according to me observation, metacoginitive activities do not work well on advanced or old ESL students. The reason is that most advanced or old ESL students have already got used to certain mode and therefore have difficulties changing it. They have used their own strategies for a long time or transferred from L1 strategy, so it is harder for them to adjust their mode even if they understand the pros and cons.

In addition to reading, I think metacognitive activities can also be applied to ESL writing. Teachers assign the topics, such as making up a story or writing by pictures, and students post their homework on the website or forum. They are asked to read others’ compositions and make comments. Thus they can see what strategies peers use to write and reflect on their own work by comparing with others’ homework or reading teachers’ comments. Moreover, teachers can choose some of their work and make students discuss how to refine certain paragraphs or sentences. Through looking for what can be improved in others’ works, L2 learners can be aware of their own pros and cons in writing. Finally teachers can ask them to rewrite or revise their homework again to access how they progress.

Using Hypertext to Teach K-12 Students

In the two experiments made by Foltz(1993), it showed that there was no significant performance differences between the readers of the hypertext and the linear text. On the whole, the subjects used equivalent reading strategies and coherent manner for different types of texts, so they achieved similar comprehension. Even if their assigned goal was to find specific information, the subjects with little background knowledge tended to acquire necessary background context first in a coherent manner instead of jumping to the specific knowledge directly.

However, if hypertext is applied to the learning of k-12 students, I think the result will be quite different. The subjects in these experiments are undergraduate students who are capable of reading texts in a coherent and organized way. But according to my teaching experience, k-12 students still have to develop their logic and reading skills through education. Therefore, if they are not familiar with the topic, they get confused and lost easily when using hypertext as learning materials. Unlike undergraduate students, if k-12 students are asked to search for specific information, they will probably look for evident labels and use jumps to go down to it instead of understanding the whole text coherently. Although it seems that they can find the relevant information efficiently, they may not really grasp at the big picture of the text. As a result, in this case, teachers play important roles in designing accurate guided questions to lead students to read the hypertext coherently and logically. Moreover, it is critical to select the well-structured hypertext as teaching materials, which makes k-12 students easy to follow. So it is a bigger challenge for teachers to apply hypertext to teach k-12 students.