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Identifying Components of Meta-Awareness about Composition: Toward a Theory and Methodology for Writing Studies

Crystal VanKooten

Abstract: Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw’s model of metacognition and Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness to outline four writing/rhetorical concepts within which meta-awareness about composition is observable. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity, and they provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how writers learn.

First-year writing (FYW) is often considered to be at the heart of writing studies. Thousands of instructors teach FYW each semester in colleges and universities across the nation, seeking to prepare students for writing they will do across the curriculum. Assessing what skills and habits students actually take and use from FYW, however, is complex. Recently, writing researchers have suggested that developing meta-awareness is one important goal for students in FYW because meta-awareness can be useful beyond the course as students write in a variety of contexts. Elizabeth Wardle, for example, argues that “meta-awareness about writing, language, and rhetorical strategies in FYC [first-year composition] may be the most important ability our courses can cultivate” (82, emphasis in original). Likewise, Rebecca Nowacek demonstrates that meta-awareness is important for integration, where students recontexualize elements within new writing situations (34). Anne Beaufort uses the closely related terminology metacognition when discussing the design of first-year writing curricula (College Writing 152; College Writing: Five Years Later); Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak integrate attention to metacognition into their Teaching for Transfer FYW curriculum (Writing across Contexts 137); and administrative documents such as the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing include attention to knowledge of thinking strategies (1). Meta-awareness has thus generated a buzz in relation to FYW curricula: it’s an important aspect of student learning, it’s related to processes for writing that might become generalizable beyond one assignment or one course, and it’s part of the how and the why (to go with the what) of composition.

Meta-awareness, however, needs to be further theorized for writing studies. One reason this is so is that the definitions we do have are broad—too “fuzzy,” to use Brianna M. Scott and Matthew Levy’s word—to be as useful as they might be in research or teaching. Often, meta-awareness is discussed as a general ability to reflect on one’s own thinking, and rarely do we indicate specific components that might constitute a more (or less) robust meta-awareness. Rafaella Negretti, for example, defines metacognitive awareness as “learners’ awareness of their thinking/learning strategies” (145), a general definition referring to all cognition and learning. Wardle gets more specific for writers in particular, describing meta-awareness about writing as students’ ability to “analyze assignments, see similarities and differences across assignments, discern what was being required of them, and determine what they needed to do in response” (76-77). Even so, Wardle’s definition remains within the mind of the writer, where writerly actions such as discerning and determining aren’t easily observed or distinguished. Our definitions thus remain fuzzy because the field lacks a framework for identifying specific components of meta-awareness relating to writing in particular, and the writing-related metacognitive moves we do attempt to describe aren’t easily seen or heard in classrooms or research sites. The inability to fully describe and observe meta-awareness is a problem that reaches beyond FYW, affecting our ability to study and assess the transfer of writing knowledge, as well. Several writing researchers have pointed out a likely connection between meta-awareness and transfer (see DePalma; Elon Statement; Gorzelsky et al.; Nowacek; Wardle; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak), but looking for evidence of transfer becomes even more difficult without empirical concepts to observe meta-awareness.

In this article, I begin to build a more specific theory of meta-awareness about composition using qualitative methods. Drawing on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by educational psychologist Gregory Schraw’s two-part model of metacognitive awareness and sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness, I map out four writing/rhetorical concepts through which specific metacognitive moves can be observed. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity. As students in the case study began to discursively express developing knowledge related to these four concepts, metacognitive moves for composition became observable. The four concepts thus provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might use and expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how first-year writers learn.