Understanding primary school students’ use of self-regulated writing strategies through think-aloud protocols

Abstract

This study seeks to extend our current understanding about the relationship between writing competence, grade level and use of self-regulated writing strategies. Especially, research regarding primary school students' use of self-regulated writing strategies in an ESL/EFL context is still lacking. Thirty-two Singapore primary school students wrote a picture composition while thinking aloud. Through analysis of the participants' think-aloud protocols related their use of metacognitive and cognitive writing strategies, the findings show that the students used 24 self-regulated writing strategies among the 87 writing strategies found in the sample more than once. The high competence students outperformed their low competence counterparts in using both metacognitive and cognitive strategies. However, inconsistent findings were found between the middle graders and upper graders. The study underscores the importance of understanding young learners’ use of self-regulated writing strategies through think-aloud protocols. The findings provide practical implications for teachers to conduct differentiated writing instruction in an ESL/EFL context.

Introduction

Writing is an essential skill for learning and expressing what students know. As English is learnt by younger and younger language learners, it is important to understand how young writers produce their writing so that teachers can know how to teach students effectively. In English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) research, use of self-regulated writing strategies, which writers deploy in order to regulate their cognitions, affects and behaviors in their writing process (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011), has been found to contribute to writing competence (Bai, 2015; Bai, Hu, & Gu, 2014; De Silva, 2015). In general, novice writers in the first language (L1) context have problems with idea generation, do little planning, have few text-generating strategies, and engage in little revision (Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008). Yet, we know very little about young language learners’ use of self-regulated writing strategies. This study aims to examine the relationship between writing competence, grade level and use of self-regulated writing strategies for primary school students in Singapore.

In Singapore, English is used by people of different ethnic groups (i.e., Chinese, Malay, and Indian) as a common tongue. As the medium of instruction and also an important subject in schools, all students are expected to study English well. More importantly, English is a global language that connects Singapore, a multi-ethnic nation with the rest of the world (Tan, Low, & Hung, 2017). Although English writing is an important skill that most teachers reported teaching as a focused area in the classroom, many Singapore primary school students faced challenges in becoming effective writers (Goh, Zhang, Ng, & Koh, 2005; Wong & Hew, 2010). Underdeveloped writing competence in primary school students is not only a problem that Singapore students are faced with but also an issue students elsewhere have e.g., the United States (see Harris & Graham, 2016). To make the situation worse is the fact where little literature on how young ESL/EFL learners employ self-regulated writing strategies in their writing process can be found. (Bai et al., 2014). Another issue with the previous research is that most studies were conducted with questionnaires, which failed to capture how self-regulated writing strategies were used online.