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Title
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Metacognitive awareness and academic literacy skills in English as a foreign language : the case of summarising
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Author
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Abstract
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| A range of studies has demonstrated that the transition from secondary to higher education (HE) remains a challenging experience for first-year students. A primary factor that has an impact on students’ acculturation to the new learning and teaching environment, and by default on their academic success, is their mastery of general and discipline-specific academic discourse. In other words, novice university students are required to learn to effectively and efficiently communicate in a manner established by their academic community by engaging with academic discourse in all its diversity. Not surprisingly, many students experience the process of academic acculturation as challenging (at best), particularly due to its implicit character and unwritten rules, which as a whole seems to create tensions and discrepancies in students’ understanding of the academic expectations of their new community. An effective command of disciplinary discourse is, nonetheless, critical for the students’ progression in HE and can be attained through their academic literacy development whether implicit or explicit. In this study, effective and integrated reading and writing are understood as central academic literacy practices through which students learn and develop their knowledge within disciplines and master disciplinary discourse. As written assignments remain the main form of assessment in HE, writing is regarded as a dominant literacy practice. However, at the very least, academic reading is an equally important literacy practice; and yet, it is often taken for granted and in turn given less attention in support materials for students' academic literacy development. Thus, a key component in the teaching and learning of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) —learning to write from reading input— academic reading remains a prevailing issue. More specifically, core academic literacy practices such as summarising and paraphrasing, in particular in a foreign and second language, continue to be challenging for first-year students and often for senior undergraduates as well. Consequently, it is important to rethink teaching and learning support for first-year students’ academic literacy skills development in a responsible and informed way. As research up to date has indicated a positive correlation between metacognition and academic performance, this study takes the perspective that first-year students can be supported in their academic literacy skills development x by increasing their metacognitive awareness of their competencies. In other words, raising students’ awareness of their strengths and weaknesses can help them better assess their own mastery of academic tasks, focus their skills development and perfect their knowledge. With the aim to further inform the design of first-year students’ academic literacy support, this thesis examines students’ strengths and weaknesses within core academic literacy practices at the beginning of HE, as well as their understanding of those competencies. The research took place at the University of Antwerp in Belgium among first-year English majors for whom English is a foreign language. In the exploratory study, students (N = 116) discussed in small groups how they had experienced academic reading (in relation to writing) during their first three months at university. In the main study, summarising was focused on. This is a skill that students make use of when checking their reading comprehension and analysing a text, and, at the same time, it represents a prototypical academic literacy task. In order to enrich the preliminary insights, a new group of students’ (N = 109) perceived and actual summarising skills (and the relationship between them) were studied by making use of a mixed-method research design. The findings of this study confirm that first-year students’ weaknesses in core academic literacy skills, such as summarising, are persistent. More in particular, filtering primary from secondary information and paraphrasing remain challenging, which indicates that students need additional support in both their receptive and productive skills in summarising. Moreover, the students’ misunderstanding or lack of understanding of their competencies can have a detrimental impact on their academic literacy development. More specifically, discrepancies have been identified in students’ awareness of their summarising skills in English as a foreign language (EFL): students tend to overestimate or underestimate their summarising skills. The aforementioned discrepancies may explain first-year students’ struggle in mastering academic discourse. Consequently, this research suggests making use of the identified discrepancies to help raise students’ awareness of their competencies in the early stages of higher education in order to additionally support their skills development. Moreover, the data show that the approach underlying the task used for the purposes of this study is useful in order to gain an insight into students’ understanding of reading and writing materials and can in turn inform syllabus xi design. Since a one-size-fits-all approach has been contested, suggestions are made as to how both approach and findings are relevant for local as well as wider contexts. Key words: first-year students, English as a foreign language, academic literacy skills development, integrated reading and writing, summarising skills, metacognitive awareness-raising, curriculum and syllabus design, support design |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerpen
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Universiteit Antwerpen, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Departement Taalkunde
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2019
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Volume/pages
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236 p.
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Note
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Van de Poel, Kris [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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