1.2.2 Relationship between academic writing and metacognition

Academic writing is a highly communicative, socially situated and genre-based activity just likepersonal and cognitive aspects of learning.

 Flower and Hayes (1980) said that the cognitive aspects of writing show itself over and over again in different states of writing. Even thoughmany researchers had criticized their point of view since this theory is not solid enough in many facets. But there are two main points deserve attention: 1) Writingenvironment which implies rhetorical situation. 2) Learners’ own cognition of this environment which affects their performance in writing practice. In their opinion, learners’ understanding of rhetorical and contextual facets in the writing practice should be called “rhetorical problems”(p.25).Actually these problems all reflect writers’ metacognitive awareness in composing while they are considering the rhetorical nature and the discoursive community. Metacognition here is closely related to genre awareness in making choices and picking strategies.

Another example provided by Gombert (1993) proposed the relationship between metacognition and academic writing from a metapragmatic perspective. He emphasized the verbal nature of metacognition, it always refers to the communicating objects. On top of this, metacognition connects closely with people’s communication environment in talking while with rhetorical enviroment or genre in writing. From this perspective, developing learners’ metacognitive awareness helps them to learn about the genre context so as to make choices and pick the right strategies.