Abstract:

Speaking or writing about writing can reveal students’ relationship to writing from their own perspective. Through language, learners can make explicit the operations or procedures that they carry out during the writing process, as well as the feelings and emotions that emerge during the process or are experienced in relation to the text product. They can also evoke the values that the learners assign to writing and the conceptions they have constructed about texts and how to write them. In the case of writing in a foreign language, an issue that also becomes salient is the writers’ relationship with their first language. This study is based on the analysis of texts produced in a metawriting (or writing about writing) task. In relation to different dimensions, praxeological, affective, axiological, and conceptual, it shows aspects that Chinese students consider under a unified or global perspective on writing and aspects that they view as specific challenges of writing in a foreign language (Portuguese).

The metawriting approach is capable of revealing students’ awareness of procedures, feelings and emotions, as well as the values and ideas that they associate with writing. Being based on the written mode of language use, it presents the difficulties, but also the potential for reflection, decision and organization that are associated with the process of composing any text. In addition, it gives rise to a product. This product can support reflection and rewriting at other moments. It can also feed into interaction with others about the relationship that each individual has established with writing. The metawriting strategy has a double potential: to reveal students’ conscious awareness of writing and to be used as a learning tool, exploring and deepening consciousness, in order to provide self-scaffolding through internal processes of monitoring and decision-making.

This study focused on students’ consciousness of writing in a foreign language. The results revealed several findings. They showed that writing in a foreign language mobilizes many aspects of the relationship with writing that was built earlier in L1 and presents specific challenges related to the characteristics of the foreign language. Both the shared aspects and the specific ones are distributed along the different dimensions of the subjects’ relationship to writing (affective, praxeological, axiological, and conceptual). Metawriting emerges as a learning strategy that can promote consciousness and scaffolding, external or internal (self-scaffolding). Knowing about students’ conscious awareness about writing is the basis for research into its pedagogical potential.

Keywords:

Writing, Consciousness, Metacognition, Metawriting, Foreign language learning.