The Effects of Self-Monitoring and Peer-Monitoring on Writing Activities

Writing is an important experience through which we are able to share ideas, arouse feelings, persuade and convince other people (White & Arndt, 1991). It is important to view writing not solely as the product of an individual, but as a cognitive, social and cultural act. Writing is an act that takes place within a context, that accomplishes a particular purpose and that is appropriately shaped for its intended audience (Hamplyones & Condon, 1989).The present research considered the significance effects of two important independent variables self-monitoring and peer-monitoring in writing activities on Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. In this research we were supposed to investigate self-monitoring & peer-monitoring effects on 173 male and female learners’ writing activities whose age ranged from 16 to 27, and they had a composing description writing paragraph as pre & posttest in the same conditions. Although many studies have been conducted on the effects of self-monitoring with a variety of students across a variety of settings (Amato-Zech, Hoff, & Doepke, 2006, L. Dunlap, G. Dunlap, L. Koegel, & R. Koegel 1991). This research studied about self-monitoring and peer-monitoring procedures which had new effects on learners’ written tasks.


Introduction
Writing is an important skill during long years of teaching to students, we are always involve with this view that how can our students write in good harmony in chronological order?This is an important issue for many years that all teachers, students, and staff are evolving with this skill.Writing is a kind of speech that we don't have a chance to say directly to audience, it's a kind of logical connection to say our beliefs, ideas that are not possible to tell on that time and situation.It is important to view writing not solely as the product of an individual, but as a cognitive, social and cultural act.Writing is an act that takes place within a context, that accomplishes a particular purpose and that is appropriately shaped for its intended audience (Hamplyones & Condon, 1989).We can see many different kind of styles in writing such as narration, description, comparative, etc.We are going to do a research to teach our learners how they can write a good description paragraph.Demanding for writing a good paragraph is crucial point of study.
In this study, writing paragraphs are the salience part of research, so I take a look at different part of writing paragraphs (introduction-body-conclusion).In addition, I define some lines about paragraph; a paragraph is a group of sentences which develop one central idea and the central idea is usually stated in a topic sentence.If a paragraph announces its main idea in the topic sentence, and if all the supporting sentences contribute to the reader's understanding of the main idea, we say that a paragraph is unified or it has unity.In writing, you cannot make use of these auditory and visual aids, so you must think and plan carefully what you're going to write to ensure that your reader knows exactly what you mean.When the order in which things happen, or a time sequence, is used to develop a paragraph, this is called chronological order.Arnaudet & Barret (1990) mentioned that writing is a skill that you say your idea without any fear from face to face talks.It's a process that helps you to go deeply into your thoughts, and purpose your idea, to share your knowledge, and it also provides you a good condition for your confidence to say your idea frankly.Meyers (2006) said that description plays an important role in many kinds of writing both in academic world and in everyday life.In a descriptive paragraph, we summarize the content in topic and it has a great impact if it evokes a particular mood rather than just describe details.
Weeden (2010) defines a description is going to describe a topic while giving a general impression of the topic.Examples are going to be used which help shape the readers view of the topic.Sensory details should be used to support the examples.This will make the reader feel like they are actually at the place, or seeing the person or object.Meyers (2006) indicates that description draws a picture of someone or something through words.Trough strong details, precise word choice, and sound organization, you allow your readers to visualize the subject matter clearly.You don't merely tell them that something is remarkable, unusual, or pretty.You show them so they can see the uniqueness, rare qualities, or beauty for themselves.In fact, your description may also involve the sense of sound, touch, motion, and even smell in addition to the sense of sight.The most logical way to organize descriptive details is in spatial order that is arranged in space from top to bottom, left to right, nearest to furthest, or the like.Even a description that involves people or animals can establish the setting or full scene first and then present details in a spatial order.

Research Questions
The present paper set out to find answers to the following research questions: 1) Do self-monitoring and peer-monitoring affect the Iranian EFL learner's writing ability differently?
2) Is there any correlation between type of monitoring and Iranian EFL learners' gender in their writing skill?

Participants
Totally 173 students including 41 male learners and 132 female learners in the age range of 15 to 27 at the intermediate level were asked to participate in this study.Subjects were homogenous in methodology used at school, type of school attended by each group, numbers of hours devoting to the teaching of English, level of language proficiency and their age.

Instruments
The following instruments were used for this study: 1) A General English Proficiency Test Nelson which determines the proficiency level of the subjects in English.
2) Composing a Description Paragraphs Test which determines the idea of study whether self-monitoring or peer-monitoring is good by following topics: a) It's better to see a movie or read a book version of a film.b) Which transportation do you prefer to travel and why?Traveling by plane, train or bus.

Procedures
To achieve the objective of this study the following procedures were taken by the researcher: First a group of learners in English language department was randomly selected, and then they were given General Proficiency Test Nelson (1977) to determine their proficiency level.Then, two composing description topics were given to them, both topics were selected from book Ready for FCE by Norris (2011) after that they wrote three paragraphs (introduction-body-conclusion) about 120-180 words in their pre-tests.After finishing writing, students have been evaluated their own writing by themselves, to monitor their own strengths, and weaknesses, the learners found errors and mistakes of themselves, then peers have been evaluated each other's writing paper by different color, and monitored peers' strengths, and weaknesses.All writing papers were also scored by the researcher, and another two raters, so each learner had 5scores for his or her pre-test papers out of 45 points.After scoring papers they were given treatment to those students who were not able to write a good paragraph, or they need their teacher's help to follow up a plan how to continue their writing, then the teacher taught them to write well-organized paragraphs and told them about their mistakes, grammatical points such as: tenses, passive & active sentences, punctuation, accurate use of expression, appropriate words, and everything related to a well-organized paragraph.In this study was observed the learners how they were cooperative, and how they have been followed the procedure exactly, and some of them were very serious about this part, and they didn't want to lose anything, they eagerly needed their teacher help whether they found the other classmate correctly or not.But the time for treatment was not enough, and they had basically problems with their selecting good expression, or appropriate words.Some of them asked the teacher for more times.The researcher noted some points relating to learners' behaviors.After treatment a post-test was given at the same condition of their pre-test , they were given a writing composition description paper including two similar topics; they had to choose one topic, and writing description paragraphs about 120-180 words; they monitored themselves by blue pen to clarify their own strengths, and weaknesses, then peers checked each other's mistakes to monitor each other's strengths, and weaknesses by red pen.All post-test writing papers were scored by present researcher, and another two raters of the same level, so all learners had 5scores for their post-test.The researcher has been considered two independent variables self-monitoring, peer-monitoring for scoring their writing composing description.Totally, each learner had 10 marks for both pre & posttest except language proficiency test.Both self and peers gave their classmates one mark for pre-test and one mark for classmates' posttest.

Scoring Method
Table 1.Scoring method According to Ibnian (2011) in table1 considered all characteristics for writing a good paragraph.Total score was out of 45 points.Each learner had 10 scores except proficiency test.They were included 5 scores for their pre-test and 5 scores for learners' posttest.In both pre & posttest, 5 scores were including researcher-first rater-second rater-student self & peers' mark.

Reliability of Tests
For testing validity, and reliability we acted as follow in table 2: 2) Varied ideas and points of view (Flexibility) 3) Unique titles and ideas (Originality) 4) Embellishing ideas with details (Elaboration) Total Points Cronbach's alpha indicated that the test was reliable, and satisfied.Of course, as you see in table 24, by deleting post-test peer-monitoring variable, we had less reliability, and it decreased from 0.89 to 0.885.Phase one:

Result and Discussion
1) Self monitoring and peer monitoring affect the Iranian EFL learners' writing ability differently.
There was significance and positive relation between self-monitoring and peer-monitoring; It was clear from table 7, it was meant that positive self-monitoring coefficient (.203) was higher than liner absolute regression peer-monitoring coefficient (-0.31), so we concluded that there was positive, and significant direct relationship between self-monitoring & peer-monitoring in academic, and occupational learners' writing activities.Whenever self-monitoring went up , peer-monitoring would also go up; whenever self-monitoring decreased, peer-monitoring would also decreased, but in this research self-monitoring had more effect on learners' writing activities in comparing with peer-monitoring negative coefficient(-.031).

Phase two:
2) There was a positive correlation between type of monitoring and Iranian EFL learners' gender in their writing skill.
Table 8 was an independent sample T-test between post-test self-monitoring scores, and post-test peer-monitoring scores; Sig.(2-tailed) was lower than 5% it was meant that there was a significant difference between the mean of post-test self-monitoring scores & the mean of post-test peer-monitoring scores among weak learners.Statistically, they were not equal in 5% significant level confidence.So, researcher was correctly made this hypothesis.It was meant that post-test raters scores were higher than pre-test raters scores; but there was no significant difference between the mean of pre & post-test peer-monitoring, and self-monitoring scores.We concluded that statistically, there was no significant difference between the mean score of pre & post-test self-monitoring, and also pre & post-test peer-monitoring; it was meant that the perform composing description test on learners did not have any significant effect on the result.There was no statistically bias on the response patterns of learners.
Although both of them were useful for providing challengeable students, and became useful for prosocial life, but self-monitoring helped them more to become awareness of their weaknesses and strengths to increase positive way of the quality and quantity of their learning in written task, and peer-monitoring occurred when the students had recognition to evaluate the other peers' behavior, and it was obviously understood that it is needed more training to receive the level of recognition of each others' behavior.Self-monitoring had more effect than peer-monitoring on EFL Iranian learners in their writing activities.12 ANOVA showed the model completely.In Table 13, self-monitoring variable coefficient (0.732) was more than peer-monitoring variable, and the difference was significant.By considering the degree of significance 0.123 which was referred to post-test peer-monitoring variable, it was showed that there was no significant relation, and peer-monitoring coefficient 0.165 was less than self-monitoring coefficient 0.732; it was proved that self-monitoring had more effect in comparing with peer-monitoring, we came to this conclusion that self-monitoring relationship was more significant, and it had more effect than peer-monitoring, so researcher hypothesis was rejected again in this way.
There was more significant relation between self-monitoring and peer-monitoring.In this study, self-monitoring had positive and important role to improve writing activities in English classroom, and it was dominated all the tasks that were covered by the teacher in class, and provided feedback for teachers to have benefit recognition of learners to make good lesson plan, and it facilitated learning writing tasks, how to be a professional writer.The role of goal setting and corrective feed back in writing activities were very important for learners who acted by self & peer-monitoring techniques.But, self-monitoring was much more considerable in this study than peer-monitoring, furthermore there was direct and positive relationship between these two techniques, whenever self-monitoring acted better, there was a good shape of peer-monitoring, and finally they could help learners to have wide view of developing good writers in learning English as a second language for foreigners.We also faced with some good attitudes of learners for providing good behaviors to inform them about their strengths and weaknesses in writing activities, especially in composing description paragraphs.Self-monitoring, and peer-monitoring techniques were facilitators' devices for learners which were emphasized in this study upon 173 EFL Iranian learners in Rashed English language Institute to show how much was important to be a good and skillful writer in English language both for teachers, and students.As you have seen before, there was no bias upon strong learners.
Patterns to use peer-monitoring, because the test could not change the result of pre & post test.In this study, there was not so much significant difference among strong learners in their post test.But their self-monitoring technique was increased that was related to their motivation through using this strategy.Goal setting was another important issue which helped learners during their writing tasks to follow in positive and direct relation by using self & peer-monitoring strategies.
During observation, the learners were sensitive to their errors, and they received feedback from teacher, and the teacher sometimes helped them to monitor in right position, of course, few learners were worried about their mistakes and errors to detect by another classmate, they did not want to cooperate with another, but some of them were very active in cooperative tasks, so they eagerly asked for result of their writing by another peers.
In this study as we calculated, although both techniques had beneficial result on learners writing activities, we understood that peer-monitoring among strong learners did not have any changes in their writing activities, with or without treatment it was something unnecessary to do, they needed some circumstances to know what exactly to do, and how they could use it in system of learning.Such techniques needed a lot of time and energy to know more about the learners to direct them according to their needs respectively in academic and social situation.
Self & peer-monitoring strategies were beneficial techniques in writing process on EFL Iranian learners who were going to learn English language as a second or foreign language.By applying these two techniques in class activities, teachers could help them by receiving feedback from learners; different kinds of feedback would be provided to improve the writing process in systematic way.Goal setting was another important issue to follow up the exact procedure for the writing activities.Goal setting would help to find out learners' real needs to give them appropriate tasks.By conducting this research, we understood there was positive and direct relationship between self & peer-monitoring and they were complementary strategies which could be used at the same time in class writing activities.
In this study, self-monitoring had positive and important role to improve writing activities in English classroom, and it was dominated all the tasks that were covered by the teacher in class, and provide feedback for teachers to have benefit recognition of learners to make good lesson plan, and it has been facilitated learning writing tasks, how to be a professional writer?The role of goal setting and corrective feed back in writing activities were very important for learners who acted by self & peer-monitoring techniques.But, self-monitoring was much more considerable in this study than peer-monitoring, furthermore there was direct and positive relation between these two techniques, whenever self-monitoring acted better, there would be good shape of peer-monitoring, and finally they could help learners to have wide view of developing good writers in learning English as a second language for foreigners.We also faced to some good attitudes of learners for providing good behaviors to inform them about their strengths and weaknesses in writing activities, especially in composing description paragraphs.Self-monitoring, and peer-monitoring techniques were facilitators' devices for learners as core search for this study upon 173 Iranian learners in Rashed English language Institute to show how much was important to be a good and skillful writer in English language both for teachers, and students.And there was no bias upon strong learners

Conclusion and Implications
For many years we hope to come to this conclusion that meta-cognitive strategies such as self-monitoring and peer-monitoring could support students to become a successful person in classroom, society, everywhere that they exist and they would learn to be logically independent from the others for evaluating themselves and each other behaviors.The most significant issue in this study, was the practical way for teaching such strategies for supporting students in a good life and society.
In this study it was obviously understood that peer-monitoring among strong learners did not have any changes in their writing activities, with or without treatment it was something unnecessary to do, they needed some circumstances to know what exactly to do, and how they could use it in the system of writing procedure.Such techniques were needed a lot time and energy to know more about the learners to guide them according to their needs respectively in academic and social situation.
Self & peer-monitoring strategies were beneficial techniques in writing process on EFL Iranian learners who have been learning English language as a second language.By applying these two techniques in writing class activities, teachers could help them by receiving feedback from learners; different kinds of feedback would have been provided to improve the writing process in systematic way.By conducting this research, we have been understood there was positive and direct relationship between self & peer-monitoring and they were complementary strategies which could be used at the same time in writing class activities.Although many studies have been conducted on the effects of self-monitoring with a variety of students across a variety of settings (Amato-Zech, Hoff, & Doepke, 2006;L. Dunlap, G. Dunlap, L. Koegel, & R. Koegel, 1991).
Goal setting was another important issue to follow up the exact procedure for writing activities.Goal setting could help to find out learners' real needs to give them appropriate tasks.Karen (2012) believed that goal setting may firstly dominated motivation, effort.Secondly, it can be a facilitator for using self-evaluation of writing system.
The process for goal setting may include five steps: -Ask students to set the goal, dividing it into sub-steps -Meet the goal and assessing progress -Operate the plan -Reset goal(s) if required Karen (2012) mentioned that learners are able to provide an appropriate aim for their writing when the teacher is sure about making an appropriate aim.
Another important issue was to create motivation, when the learners are motivated to do their writing plan according to their academic or social needs, they could intentionally share a good role in writing activities.
The last issue was timing, enough time to write would facilitate writing process to think deeply about the topic, and to have space to arrange the correct way of setting materials to write introduction, body, and conclusion parts.
The present research should be mentioned here that a particular plan was needed according to learners' needs, age, and level for providing goal, when it was possible for learners to set the goal at first stage of using self-monitoring and peer-monitoring strategies, then specified tasks were given, so they would have better motivation to participate in learning writing process.By defining them a goal setting, they have been cooperated in learning and they would have been arrived at the level of recognizing their strengths and weaknesses.Because of a lot of writing activities that can be helpful for learners and assisting in being free to write, and to express their ideas, and emotions, writing can be a good challenge among learners to monitor their own mistakes to follow a corrective feedback for their next writing task.
One of the pedagogical implications of this study is that self-monitoring, and peer-monitoring strategies can be utilized to evaluate the learners' strengths and weaknesses.And this can be helpful in any field such as their jobs or education.
The two questions in this study have been answered by analyzing data which were collected from further research by two options that one of them was enough cooperative activities, and the other one was required self-evaluation to monitor learners' own behavior.
Finally, we concluded that self-monitoring has been manifested as a strategy that was related to oneself, so the learners should have been acquired some knowledge by recognition level of themselves, much more reading tasks would be helpful for them to improve their writing, to write a good description paragraph, and to be a skillful person in this field.Both self & peer monitoring were important and significant strategies for learners in writing domain, It was discovered that achieving the level of recognition was very considerable to give them written appropriate tasks, because they should gather more information about themselves, and know each other to increase their strengths and remove their weaknesses.It was also important to give them awareness about the target of written task, so learners could have been achieved a better understanding toward the goal and they could have been managed their behavior according to the purpose of written task, then the result would have been accepted.There was also significant and positive relationship between two Meta cognitive strategies self & peer monitoring that were shown to be useful methods for improving writing skill in any situation.The current research hopes that the result of this study will open new window for teachers, learners, and all staffs who are involved in teaching English as a second language to cover academic and social needs of learners and to answer how to be a good writer.
As Peterson (2010) mentioned when students have autonomy to make decision about the feedback, they are eagerly to improve their writing tasks.Feedback is the most workable if we use it at the beginning and middle stages of writing process to revise or edit their writing parts.
The researcher came to this conclusion that all teachers could identify their tasks according to learners' real needs and follow up some extra activities such as group working or cooperative tasks that feedback should have appropriately received by students.Although errors are inevitable, those learners who are involved with their real need task, it may help a lot to give them a corrective feedback.There is always no need to make them a draft or sample to do their writing task, of course, they need some rules to adopt their behavior to recognize their right or wrong behavior of learning, we can specify one appropriate strategy such as self-monitoring or peer-working, then it will clearly manage their needs, and writing process will facilitate better than the previous time, we can observe the results of our tasks sooner according to their needs.Aside from all techniques which we use in class, as I've observed in all my classes, learners who monitor themselves are good followers of system in writing process, and they will soon be a skillful person in their learning task.

Limitations of the Study
For using peer-monitoring strategy in writing classroom, we faced to some limitations that we should have been aware of recognition term which was necessary for peers, because they should have been arrived at the level of recognition, and it has been taken so much time for preparing the peers for the level of recognition to be able to evaluate the other peers according to specific evaluation area, and specific evaluation criteria that was identified by teacher in classroom, and we were not sure about them for the exact purpose of peer-monitoring in one classroom, because there was not any testable accurate way.So, before using this strategy, we should teach them how peers could evaluate their classmate's performance according to specific criteria that they recognized how to evaluate the peer's performance and they should have been arrived at the level of recognition.
Another limitation in this study was training.Training was a critical aspect of ensuring consistency and confidence in peer supporters.Essential specific training should have been developed in association with the defined role of the peer supporter within the peer-to-peer program.Some programs have been developed or have been adapted their own training program while others used external training programs.
By the learners performing, it was critical to collect data on the effectiveness of the peer supporter program.If neither of them had performed effectively, it would be necessary to determine whether the cause is systemic or is related to the individual peer supporter.
We have also understood that direct peer-monitoring had a very useful control mechanism which helped them to know how the learners perform and behave.On the other hand, indirect peer monitoring didn't have a good control mechanism because it was not interesting for organizing the programs.
One obvious problem was that it didn't account for the fact that some groups were generally more cooperative than the others.Thus, in some groups there might have been more needs to monitor than the others.
Another limitation of this study was the time of preparing learners for self & peer monitoring, and the time was not enough to show the real similarities, and differences between two important strategies.
The last limitation was teacher's feedback, which was very important for learners who needed the teacher's feedback on their writing task, effectiveness of two strategies self & peer-monitoring has been dependent on teacher's feedback that supported them during writing activities to follow up a real situation according to their needs.Appropriateness of teacher's feedback was a little crucial.

Table 3 .
Identified all descriptive statistical data of 173 learners As you can see in table 2 & 3 indicated the division among strong, medium, and weak learners, and it was shown how much percentage was belong to female or male.So, as it was shown in table 2, frequency of most learners was at medium level, and we had less strong and weak learners.Table 4. Percentage of strong-medium-weak learners

Table 8 .
Comparison means in an independent samples t-testAs you can see in table 9, in order to see that the degree of significance between two scores was higher than 5%, Sig.(2-tailed) was 0.192, and the difference was not significant, it was meant that strong learners were equal in post-test self-monitoring and post-test peer-monitoring scores.It was clearly shown that treatment couldn't change the behavior of strong learners' performance in post-test.

Table 10
was liner regression, peer-monitoring coefficient was negative (-.031) and absolute value was less than self-monitoring coefficient (.203), so we induced that self-monitoring relation had more effect, and power than peer-monitoring.Then, we calculated the exact above relation again, this time we considered post testers as dependent variable and we considered predicators as post-test self-monitoring & post-test peer-monitoring as follow: