The effects of metacognitive strategy instruction in collaborative digital multimodal composing on students’ writing development

Purpose This study focuses on how a metacognitive strategy-based instructional collaborative digital multimodal composing (CDMC) program would promote Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing development.Design A total of 40 postgraduate non-English major students from a university in East China participated in our study. The experimental group of students received three weeks of metacognitive strategy-based instruction, while the control group was taught with regular instruction.Findings Both groups collaborated on three argumentative video tasks after instruction. Pre-tests, immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests of writing were administered to compare the two groups’ writing development. Results of our study indicated that metacognitive strategy instruction in CDMC could enhance students’ individual writing performance in the content, organization, vocabulary, syntactic accuracy, complexity and fluency and that students tended to dismiss the surface levels of written texts, such as language use, mechanics and word-level accuracy.Value Our study has great heuristic value in integrating CDMC pedagogy into EFL learners’ writing classrooms to promote the development of EFL learners’ writing competence.