Fostering students’ metacognitive knowledge through written comments

In the discussion of effective teachers’ written comments in L2 writing, much attention has been given to how these comments would lead to an improvement in students’ language proficiency and writing ability in general. Nevertheless, recent studies on students’ perception of teachers’ written comments have revealed limitations in these content-focused and form-focused comments, in particular their inadequacy in empowering students to do revision based on teachers’ suggestions, leading to a no-win situation. With this backdrop, in addition to the aforementioned practices of written comments, this article suggests a third approach to giving written comments in L2 writing which promotes students’ metacognitive knowledge in three ways: to think about their strengths and weaknesses (person knowledge), to think about the task requirements (task knowledge), to think about the strategies that are suitable for the students and the task(strategic knowledge), which would ultimately motivate students to respond to teachers’ comments.