The role of Metacognitive Strategies in the Creation of Discourse

Abstract

Bachman and Palmer (1996) define communicative competence as the ability to create and interpret discourse. According to the authors, this ability is organized into two main constituents: language competence and metacognitive strategies. The former refers to the domain of information stored in memory; and encompassing grammatical, textual, functional and sociolinguistic knowledge. The latter refer to the metacognitive, the neurological and physiological processes that provide a cognitive management for language use. On the one hand, these mental processes make it possible for the different sectors of language knowledge to interact internally to create language. On the other hand, they serve as a mediator between these internal traits and the external context. This paper attempts to shed light on therole of metacognitionin the creation and interpretation of discourse