Abstract:
The paper examines the position occupied by English language in Nigeria’s educational system in its
introduction. A cursory look at the state of essay writing of students in secondary schools in Nigeria
was made. The main thrust of the paper was on the methodologies used in teaching essay writing in the
language classroom. The paper contends that the conventional method of teaching essay writing that is
primarily product- based proves ineffective at promoting the skill and art of essay writing in students.
Therefore an alternative approach in the form of metacognitive learning strategy was proposed. This
strategy of learning entails self- planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation on a given task in
composition writing. This is because available literature indicate that students who produced good
essays used metacognitive learning strategy to plan and monitor their work more than students whose
essays were of poor quality. The emphasis of the strategy was on the development of reflective practice
and efforts geared towards developing learner autonomy, independence and self regulation. Therefore,
the paper recommends that among other things, explicit metacognitive training should be offered to
students of secondary schools which will go a long way in enriching their writing performances
