COGNITIVE WRITING STRATEGIES AND ERROR PATTERNS IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH WRITING AMONG NON-ENGLISH MAJOR UNDERGRADUATES

Abstract

This qualitative study investigates cognitive writing strategies and common error patterns among non-English major undergraduate students involved in academic research writing. The study explores how students use planning, monitoring, revising, elaboration, and self-evaluation strategies during writing. It also identifies frequent linguistic and structural errors and it examines the link between strategy use and error occurrence. Data were collected from 15 participants through semi-structured interviews, think-aloud protocols, and document analysis. The findings show that active metacognitive engagement is connected to better coherence and clarity; although, students still face ongoing grammatical and cohesion issues. Annotated writing samples were presented to show differences in strategy use and error frequency. Hence, the study emphasizes the need for teaching methods that combine metacognitive strategy training with focused language instruction to boost writing skills in non-English majors. It also discusses directions for teaching and future research (Booth Olson et al., 2023; Chen, 2023; Rahmat et al., 2024; Teng, 2023).