Metacognitive writing awareness, strategies, and critical thinking skills among Chinese non-English majors

Amidst the rapid expansion of technology-supported instruction in Chinese higher education, non-English majors are increasingly required to complete academic writing tasks in blended or fully online English courses.Yet little is known about how these learners deploy metacognitive awareness and strategies, nor how such deployment relates to their critical thinking performance.This study investigated metacognitive writing awareness, strategy, and critical thinking skills among 505 non-English majors enrolled at Hunan University of Environment and Biology.Employing a descriptive-correlational design, data were gathered through validated survey instruments and analyzed with descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVAs, and Pearson correlations.Results showed that participants possessed moderate-to-high metacognitive writing awareness, particularly in declarative and conditional knowledge, planning, monitoring, and evaluation.They likewise report frequent and effective use of metacognitive writing strategies (planning, monitoring, evaluating, information management) and expressed positive self-efficacy beliefs, although application gaps remain.Significant variations emerged across sex, year level, and major, with Liberal Arts students demonstrating marginally stronger awareness than Science peers.Most critically, robust positive correlations linked metacognitive writing awareness, strategy employment, and critical thinking ability, confirming that heightened awareness and strategic action fostered superior critical engagement with writing tasks.Grounded in these findings, an enhancement program-incorporating scaffolded metacognitive instruction, discipline-specific writing workshops, and teacher-integrated critical thinking tasks-was proposed to bolster English writing competence among Chinese non-English majors operating in blended learning contexts.