Metastrategies employed by science and engineering EFL learners in a speaking task

Abstract

Self-regulated students who control their own learning performance can learn more successfully than those who lack self-regulatory capabilities, and they are more likely to be successful when compared to non-self-regulated learners. Self-regulated learning includes constructs such as background knowledge, strategies and metastrategies. Metastrategy has been defined as an “executive function” which controls cognitive, affective, social and motivational dimensions through coordinating, planning, organizing, implementing, monitoring, evaluating, and orchestrating strategy use. Speaking English has become essential for students who study English as a foreign language (EFL). Currently, the unsatisfactory communicative performance of Thai students has led educators to find methods of improving their listening and speaking skills. Therefore, this study investigates metastrategies and corresponding metastrategy sets employed by Thai EFL students in a speaking task using a state-of-the-art strategic self-regulation model of L2 learning (S2R model). The results show that the EFL learners employed metastrategies and metastrategy sets in the forethought, performance, and self-reflection phases of the speaking task. The EFL students mostly used sets of metacognitive strategies, followed by meta-affective strategies, metamotivational strategies then metasocial strategies. Based on the findings and the literature review, a proposed metastrategy speaking model for EFL students was created.