AWEJ Volume.4 Number.2, 2013 Pp.160 -172
Investigating the Impact of Constructive Planning as Both a Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy: A Case Study of Third-year LMD Students of English at the University of Constantine 1, Algeria
Rania Boudaoud
Department of Letters and English Language
University of Constantine 1, Algeria
Abstract
The capacity of expressing oneself effectively in the written language is very important in learning languages, and it is only by mastering the different crafting skills, namely textual organization, that student writers can produce acceptable compositions. Through the use of two different research instruments, the ultimate goal of this study is to investigate the position of constructive planning in writing instructions and to emphasize the importance of knowing both the What and How of outlining. Through the use of students’ questionnaires, we found that poor content organization is the most common writing problem that Algerian EFL undergraduate students come up against. Despite teachers’ efforts to teach constructive planning strategies to their students, students do not effectively grasp the fundamentals of the process. The results collected from the writing test demonstrated the effectiveness of constructive planning as both a cognitive and metacognitive strategy where an overall improvement in students’ writing performance was demonstrated.
Keywords: textual organization, undergraduate composition, constructive planning, writing process.