Investigating the Effects of Scaffolding Genre Knowledge and Metacognitive Strategy Use on EFL Learners’ Academic Writing Skills: A Mixed-Methods Study

This mixed-methods study aimed to investigate the effects of scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on english as a foreign language (efl) learners’ academic writing skills. the initial population was 100 efl students from m.a. english language teaching (elt) students who took academic writing courses at islamic azad university, tehran, and alborz branches. the method for sample selection was convenience sampling. to homogenize the sample, the oxford placement test (opt) was administered, and based on its results, 75 intermediate learners were selected for the purpose of the study. after that, they were divided into 3 groups, namely the experimental group a (scaffolding genre knowledge), the experimental group b (metacognitive strategy use), and the control group. ielts academic writing task 2 was administered as the pretest and posttest. the treatments lasted for 16 sessions. to explore the learners’ perceptions regarding the instructions qualitatively, the semi-structured individual interviews were administered to 20 students who were chosen from the experimental groups. the results showed that scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use had significant impacts on the iranian efl learners’ academic writing skills. in addition, the findings indicated that there was a significant difference between the effects of scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on the iranian efl academic writing skills in which scaffolding genre knowledge had more significant effects on iranian efl academic writing skills than metacognitive strategy use. furthermore, the qualitative findings showed that the learners adopted positive views towards scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognitive strategy use in developing their academic writing skills.