Abstract:
Learning English as a foreign language (EFL) is not as easy as what is usually understood. Developing advanced proficiency in English, especially cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP), is even more challenging. Generally speaking, cognitive/academic English is different from how English is used in daily situations in many ways, some of which are typically reflected in its lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and other subject or topic-specific features, among other things. Understandably, writing in EFL is a demanding task, and the degree of difficulty exacerbated when EFL students have to write in academic English (Zhang, 2013). Oftentimes, scholars have tended to associate the difficulty mentioned above only with students’ cognitive ability, without having taken into full consideration many sociocultural factors. More importantly, the value of teacher scaffolding in the learning process has not been given the credit that it deserves. In this paper, I attempt to highlight the role of the teacher in enhancing learner genre awareness and metacognition and the interaction between learner genre awareness and metacognition for developing EFL students toward high levels of academic English ability. Specifically, I maintain that provision of learning strategies guided by metacognitive instruction coupled with genre-sensitizing and enhancement will offer students opportunities to experience success because of their teachers scaffolding their learning of various language skills for possible language output (speaking, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar). I conclude that such a pedagogical approach of creating opportunities for genre and metacognition to interact in students’ learning processes needs to be brought to the fore for maximizing their capacity for developing high levels of cognitive/academic English proficiency. Keywords: metacognition, metacognitive-scaffolding, genre awareness, cognitive/academic language learning, strategy-based instruction
