A Study On Application Of Self-Monitoring Strategy In English Writing Teaching In Higher Vocational College

With the development of English teaching pedagogy, the focus has beentransferred from teacher-centered model to student-centered model, so researchers paymore attention to learning strategies. Metacognitive strategy is one of the mostpopular learning strategies in the aspect of the second language acquisition. As thecore of metacognitive strategies, self-monitoring (SM) strategy relates to monitoringone’s own action or comprehension. Given the link between metacognitive theory andwriting, self-monitoring should be closely related to EFL (English as a foreignlanguage) learners’writing performance. In China, Tang Fang and Xu Jinfen (2007)make statements on self-monitoring strategy in writing that in order to get differentwriting goals (including improving writings skills and increasing compositions’qualities), writers apply their own thoughts, feelings and behaviors actively. However,empirical studies relative to SM in EFL writing are few in China.Most of Chinese EFL students in higher vocational college level have weakEnglish basis and fail to organize and express their ideas in English written formappropriately. Hence, the author tries to study the feasibility of application SMstrategy training in English writing teaching in higher vocational college. The studyaims at answering the following three research questions:(1) Can SM training promote students’English writing performance?(2) What influence can SM training exert on students’monitoringawareness? (3) What are students’points of view towards SM training?In order to answer these research questions, a self-monitoring training isintegrated into the routine college English writing instruction. The study involves 48students from two classes of Grade Two majoring in Business English in FushunVocational and Technical College. Each of the classes consists of 24 students. ClassOne is randomly chosen to be the comparison class (CC), and Class Two theexperimental class (EC). They are taught by the same teacher, and the same writingtextbook is supplied. Besides the routine writing instruction, the EC receives SMtraining in their writing learning process. The whole experiment lasts one semester,totally 16 weeks. There are three kinds of instruments used in the experiment: twowriting tests consisting of one writing pretest and one writing posttest, twoquestionnaires, as well as interviews at the end of the experiment. The experiment isdivided into four periods. The results obtained from two tests, two questionnaires andinterviews are analyzed, at the same time the differences of the results are comparedby SPSS 17.0. Major findings and pedogogical implications are concluded andsuggestions for further research is given at last.