Socially-shared Metacognitive Regulation Episodes Between Undergraduate Engineering Students During a Collaborative Genre Analysis Task in an English for Academic Purposes Course

Abstract

Recent findings suggest that genre-based tasks such as move analysis when underpinned by the theory of metacognition can familiarize undergraduate students with newly encountered academic genres such as the research article. However, there still is a limited understanding about how and when novices engage in socially shared metacognitive regulation processes (SSMR) during online collaborative genre analysis tasks. The purpose of this study was to identify when and how a small group of undergraduate engineering students engaged in SSMR processes during a collaborative online move analysis wiki task. Results suggest SSMR was frequently triggered when participants faced a task-related problem and manifested as an expression of doubt and conflicting ideas or when participants attempted to reach a consensus on seemingly difficult genre analysis aspects.