Investigating EFL Learners’ Metalinguistic Understanding in Refining Their Academic Writing: A Lesson from Teachers’ Writing Feedback
Keywords:
Academic writing, EFL learners , Metalinguistic understanding, Metalinguistic feedbackAbstract
This study investigates the role of metalinguistic understanding in refining EFL learners’ academic writing and examines how metalinguistic teacher feedback enhances the quality of such writing. Academic writing in EFL contexts requires more than grammatical accuracy, as learners must also manage coherence, cohesion, lexical precision, rhetorical organization, and academic register. To explore these issues, the study employed a qualitative multi-site design involving 33 EFL learners enrolled in academic writing classes in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Albania. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and classroom observations and analyzed using the qualitative procedures of data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing. The findings reveal that metalinguistic understanding supports learners in several important ways. It strengthens awareness of grammar and language choice, improves self-monitoring during drafting and revision, enhances coherence and argument organization, promotes more precise academic vocabulary, and fosters learner confidence and autonomy. The findings also show that metalinguistic teacher feedback improves writing quality by clarifying the reasons behind errors, encouraging deeper engagement with feedback, drawing attention to discourse-level features, supporting transfer to future writing tasks, and promoting reflective revision. These results suggest that metalinguistic awareness and explanatory feedback are central to the development of academic writing in EFL settings. The study concludes that academic writing instruction should move beyond error correction and incorporate metalinguistic support as a means of helping learners become more reflective, independent, and effective academic writers.
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