WRITING PROCESSES AND META-COGNITIVE STRATEGIES OF FOUR INDONESIAN TERTIARY LEVEL EFL STUDENTS :A Think Aloud Protocol Based Study

摘要

The research reported in this thesis investigated the issues of second/foreign language writing processes and strategies. The purpose of the study was to investigate the processes as well as meta-cognitive strategies applied by four Indonesian EFL tertiary students while they were writing an English argumentative essay. Data for the study consisted of think-aloud reports as well as post-writing questionnaires collected from two higher-scored and two lower-scored writers with different levels of language proficiency (i.e. low intermediate, high intermediate, and advanced). Analyses of both the transcribed protocols and post-writing questionnaires substantiated previous researchers’ findings that all of the participants followed complex, non-linear, recursive processes of writing, in which the sub-processes (i.e. planning, organizing, evaluating, and revising) might appear in the pre-, while-, and post- writing stages. Besides that, the findings also revealed important differences of meta-cognitive strategies used by both pairs of writers, in that the higher-scored writers displayed a larger number of meta-cognitive strategies, in terms of strategies for planning, organizing, evaluating, and revising, than the lower-scored ones.