Metacognitive strategies involve those used to control one's own cognition through the coordination, planning, organization and evaluation of the learning process. In Chapter 4, we saw that successful memorization from a cognitive point of view requires two complementary processes: encoding, which involves integrating new information into the memory; and retrieval practice, which involves frequent retrieval of this new information to strengthen the memory trace to the newly stored information. In addition to this, Part 2 of the book has examined the process of encoding, through various strategies such as mnemonic associations, visual association and component analysis. This chapter deals with the managing and organizing of metacognitive strategies used in the process of retrieval practice. It will also examine the underlying processes of metacognitive control, which is conceptualized within self-regulation theory, as outlined in the previous chapter. Metacognitive processes are of vital importance when learning Japanese written characters, because a learner will often have to learn upwards of 100 kana in the beginning stages of language learning and then long lists of kanji each week as they progress into the intermediate and advanced stages, while ensuring they are maintaining knowledge of up to hundreds (or thousands) of previously studied kanji and kana through regular review. Therefore, the coordination and management of the study of written Japanese is probably even more important than the initial encoding itself for long-term success in reaching a functionally literate level in Japanese writing.

In some learning strategies studies, the term indirect strategies has been used to categorize those strategies that are not applied directly to the learning process; indirect strategies are used to describe those strategies that are concerned with the management of the learning process. This book prefers the term metacognitive strategies, which have been defined as 'controlling cognition through the co-ordination of the planning, organization and evaluation of the learning process' (Oxford, 2001: 166). The concept of metacognitive strategy use has also been described under the umbrella term metacognitive control strategies in the self-regulation conceptual framework.