<![CDATA[This study investigates whether diagnostic-driven syntactic training, as opposed to conventional drilling, functions as a metacognitive scaffolding mechanism for 20 EFL learners preparing for the TOEFL ITP Structure and Written Expression subtest. Situated within a multilingual higher education context where English certification serves as a critical gateway for academic mobility, the program adopted a mixed-methods design across four sequential phases: diagnostic baseline testing, instructional strategy workshop, syntactic error analysis and remedial drilling, and post-test evaluation. Data were collected from pre- and post-tests, error mapping sheets, observation logs, and feedback surveys, and analyzed using the Shapiro-Wilk test, paired-sample t-test, N-gain, Dulay et al.'s (1982) Surface Strategy Taxonomy, and Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis. Findings indicate that diagnostic-driven training significantly improved participants' scores (t(19) = 8.42, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 1.89), with a mean gain of 15.8 points and a medium N-gain of 0.62. The most dominant error category was omission (38%), which decreased by 20 percentage points after the intervention, while misordering, misformation, and addition also declined significantly. Qualitative findings identified three interrelated themes: enhanced metacognitive syntactic awareness, enhanced test-taking self-efficacy, and academic communicative motivation. Notably, participants viewed diagnostic training as most effective when paired with structured drilling rather than as a standalone approach, favouring explicit error mapping over passive formula memorization in high-stakes test preparation. The study argues that diagnostic-driven syntactic training in EFL test preparation is best understood as a metacognitive scaffolding mechanism, whose effectiveness shifts according to the epistemic and performance demands of different test-taking activities.]]>
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