Innovation in Language Learning

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into academic writing is reshaping how students engage in the writing process, but little is known about its impact on students' metacognition. In our study, we investigated how students' use of generative AI during prewriting, drafting, and editing influences their metacognitive processes and writing proficiency. A questionnaire measuring students AI-assisted writing process, four metacognitive dimensions, and writing scores was administered to a sample of 315 Moroccan university students. Mediation analysis was employed to test whether generative AI use during each writing stage affected writing proficiency through metacognitive feelings (MF), metacognitive experience (ME), online task-specific metacognitive knowledge (OMK), and online task-specific metacognitive strategies (OMS). The results showed that AI-assisted drafting negatively and significantly impacted metacognitive feelings, metacognitive experience and task-specific metacognitive knowledge. On the other hand, AI-assisted prewriting was positively related to all the four dimensions of metacognition. AI-assisted editing had little impact, except for a small positive effect on task-specific metacognitive knowledge. In turn, with the direct effect of AI-assisted writing on proficiency being non-significant, online task-specific metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive feelings emerged as significant full mediators.  Theoretically, the results confirm the central role of metacognition in EFL writing. Practically, they show that AI may support planning and conceptualization phases in a metacognitively beneficial way, but overreliance on AI during the prewriting stage might reduce students' metacognitive engagement. These findings contribute to the emerging literature on AI-assisted EFL writing by highlighting that AI is not uniformly beneficial across the writing stages. Its pedagogical value lies in how and when it is used. Instructional interventions should consequently aim to foster reflective use of AI, particularly during early stages of writing, for students to develop metacognitive awareness and increase their writing proficiency.