A number of studies have confirmed the positive effect of writing reflective journals on L2 learning. However, the relationship between writing reflective journals and the use of self-regulated writing strategies remains unclear. To redress this knowledge gap, we assigned 38 Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students three journal-writing tasks in which they reflected on their writing processes and explored (1) the types of self-regulated writing strategies and changes to those strategies that the students’ reflective journals documented; (2) how students with varied writing-proficiency levels differed in their use of self-regulated writing strategies; and (3) the effects of reflective-journal writing on students’ self-perceived use of self-regulated writing strategies in particular, and on their L2 writing in general. Among the 19 kinds of strategies identified in 112 reflective-journal entries, only five (i.e., handling feedback, resource management, text processing, emotion regulation, and idea planning) were demonstrated relatively frequently. The use of seven strategies (i.e., self-monitoring and evaluation, idea planning, perspective change, emotional control, effort regulation, peer learning, and resource management) exhibited significant increases over time, especially during the second-half of the focal semester. In addition, our journal data highlighted individual variation in proficiency levels: with high-proficiency students significantly more likely than others to apply idea planning, feedback handling, and resource management and low-proficiency ones significantly more likely than others to engage in goal-setting. The qualitative results suggest that the practice of journaling raised students’ awareness and may have contributed to an increase in their use of self-regulated writing strategies. In particular, the findings reveal how students internalized and reconstructed the various SRL processes taking place via writing reflective journals. For L2 educators using or considering using reflective journals, these findings contain fresh insights that could help them not only to increase their students’ SRL levels, but also to provide more individualized SRL guidance.

As a response to a call to investigate the fundamental aspects regarding educational theory, research, designing and teaching of language massive open online courses (MOOCs), this study first developed a Community of Inquiry (CoI) observation protocol, to observe the existing teaching, social, and cognitive presences in language MOOCs, and tested its reliability using g-theory analysis. The results showed that the developed observation protocol is reliable, as evidenced by the large proportion of variance attributed to variation across courses rather than across raters. A follow-up d-study suggested that five and 11 raters were enough to reach moderate and substantial reliability coefficients, respectively. The study also identified exemplary practices that reflected high-level CoI presences in language MOOCs. The result not only highlighted the need to conduct observational studies to disentangle the dynamic interchanges that occur in language MOOCs, but also provided practical guidelines to language educators interested in designing and teaching their own MOOCs.