Metacognitive Process in Online Text Construction

Many studies have reported the results of how students constructed texts, yet the cognitive process of how texts were constructed by sentences and how the constructive process was formulated and reformulated have rarely been addressed. This study aims to develop a computer-aided text construction system which supports 83 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students in inserting sentences to construct texts with the scaffoldings of lexical cohesion and sentence relations. The students’ actions in text construction were recorded in a recording module which showed their metacognitive process during the task. Results of this study revealed that the engagement in metacognitive process was rarely found in the students who made little progress through three online texts. The students who demonstrated the developmental progress in three texts were actively engaged in the metacognitive process to monitor and evaluate their text constructive problems. They then frequently revised the text by reselecting the sentences with the assistance of lexical cohesion and sentence relations. It was further found that students’ metacognition could be strengthened by the text construction task. The increased engagement in metacognition, especially reselecting the sentences (revising), led to higher scores being obtained in text construction.