Developing Graduate Students' Self-Regulation In The English Writing Process

Teaching students self-regulatory skills is currently viewed as one of the major goals of education. Most researchers focus their attention on younger learners or learners with learning disability. As the subjects with comparatively strong learning autonomy, is it still necessary for graduate students to receive special training for developing self-regulated strategies?English writing is one of the weakest links in graduate student's study. A survey was taken to investigate graduate students'ability to employ self-regulatory strategies in the writing process and the following findings have emerged: (1) The students are stimulated to write by instrumental motivation rather than by integrative motivation. Many of them manifest insufficient interest in writing. (2) The students still rely too much on the teacher to make decision on the learning of writing. They lack of initiative and autonomy in improving their writing ability. (3) The absence of perfect employment of writing strategies is an obstacle for the students'writing. Many students are reluctant to exchange their products with others because they are unsatisfied with their writing outcomes.The other purpose of this study is to testify the effectiveness of embedding the instruction of self-regulatory strategies in the traditional writing courses."Self-Regulated Strategy Development"(SRSD) model, developed by Graham and Harris (1989), is introduced. An experiment was conducted and the following conclusions have been reached: (1) The students who have received SRSD have a better understanding of strategy and mastery over the whole writing process related to a specific task. It is interesting to find that intermediate- and low- achievers can benefit more from SRSD model than high achievers. (2) The students who have received SRSD have achieved more accurate perception of self-efficacy than those who have not. (3) The students who have received SRSD display higher levels of self-satisfaction and greater intrinsic interest than those who have not. (4) The students who have received SRSD are more reflectively involved in learning and employing the writing strategies.Due to the small sample size and time limitation, the results yielded from this study will only serve as hypotheses to be further tested in the future.