Online metacognitive tasks for efl distance learners

Abstract

Online courses have benefited from the adequate use of digital resources that allow learners to be the center of their own learning process. More often online instructors not only aim at what students have to individually do but learners are also engaged in interacting with the educational community by means of a variety of metacognitive activities, which can be planned, thought and accomplished anywhere and at any time (ubiquitous learning). This article proposes a debate on the awareness of strategic knowledge acquisition to particular situations providing interactive scenarios among students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in online courses. Without communicative activities, the successful production of any foreign language is not complete since knowledge building and the understanding of the foreign language, either in written or spoken form, are the key points of an adequate performance of communication. The findings of this study will provide information about useful online tasks for the adequate performance of communicative metacognitive skills required in an EFL language distance course. Finally, some future research paths inclined to improve EFL distance learners from a metacognitive and ICT-based collaborative perspective are also suggested.