学术英语写作学习者的元认知与体裁习得研究

Exploring academic writing learners’ metacognitive knowledge, genre awareness and genre knowledge development

本文运用质性个案研究方法,考察了8名研究生在学习硕士学位论文体裁过程中学的元认知,探讨了他们的体裁意识发展和体裁知识习得,收集的数据包括访谈、学习日记「习和学生写作文本。结果表明:学生的元认知主体知识和任务知识与体裁学习对任务执行和个人角色的特殊要求联系起来;受此影响,学生发展了陈述性元认知体裁意识,但并未进阶到程序性和条件性元认知水平,体裁意识总体比较薄弱;学生主要习得了体裁知识中的形式知识,修辞知识和过程知识则仍需进一步发展。研究结果对学术英语写作体裁教学的设计有启示作用。

Metacognition research provides a new perspective for looking into students* genre awareness and knowledge development in academic writing classes. The paper reports an in-depth case study that investigated eight postgraduate students5 metacognition, genre awareness and genre knowledge development in a thesis preparatory course. Data were collected from interviews, students' learning diaries, and their written texts. It was found that the students shaped specific task knowledge and self knowledge when learning in this writing class;such metacognition had an effect on their metacognitive genre awareness: they increased declarative genre awareness, but had not advanced it to procedural and conditional levels;accordingly, they had come to understand the overall form and content of theses in their disciplines and some rhetorical functions, but had not yet grasped the more subtle aspects of rhetorical knowledge and process knowledge: their genre knowledge developed in the course was nascent, in need of further development. The study has implications for genre-based academic writing pedagogy.