The effect of feedback on metacognitive strategy use in EFL writing

This study mainly explored the effects of teacher feedback, peer feedback and automated feedback on the use of metacognitive strategies in EFL writing. Ninety-seven participants were recruited and divided into three groups, who received two months of feedback from teachers, peers and an automatic writing evaluation system, respectively, and then completed English writing tasks. Metacognitive strategies in this study entail planning strategies (including language knowledge accumulation strategies and pre-planning strategies), monitoring strategies (including selective attention strategies and self-monitoring strategies), and self-evaluation strategies. By conducting repeated-measures ANOVA on three groups of participants’ use of metacognitive strategies before and after receiving different feedbacks, it was found that there were statistically significant differences in the effects of teacher feedback, peer feedback, and automated feedback on the use of selective attention strategies, whereas there were no statistically significant differences in the impact of those aforementioned types of feedback on other metacognitive strategies. It was also found that automated feedback had a hindrance effect on the use of monitoring strategies, whereas teacher feedback and peer feedback had a promotive effect on the use of all metacognitive strategies.