How Teachers can Improve Japanese High School Students’ Self–Efficacy and Metacognition by Providing Instructions and Written Feedback

A Grounded Theory Approach

Abstract

In this study, I investigated how Japanese high school students’ self-efficacy and metacognition can be improved by instructions and written feedback from their teachers. Teachers often try to improve students’ writing by focusing exclusively on errors. However, students will become more competent at English by improving their psychological and cognitive processes, in addition to fixing grammatical errors. In this report, we model student's abilities to complete writing tasks in terms of three factors-self-efficacy, metacognition, and writing strategies- with the aid of feedback from teachers. Upon completion of each written task, students were instructed to submit a written reflection on their feelings throughout the writing process in a "learning journal". These journals provided qualitative data necessary to allow an analysis of these three factors based on the Grounded Theory Approach. In their feedback, the teachers provided codes to notify the students of errors in their sentences. This meant that the students were required to use their metacognition to fix errors by themselves. Moreover, encouraging comments were included to increase the students’ self-efficacy.