Writing Strategies And The Use Of Nominalization Expressions:A Correlation Study

As an indispensable part of second language acquisition, English writing is not only one of the most important professional skills for English majors to cultivate, but also the difficult point of English writing teaching. Many scholars (Wenden&Rubin,1987; Cohen,1990; O’Malley&Chamot,2001) have discovered that the use of appropriate language learning strategies can lead to improved proficiency or achievement in the students’learning activities. But Cai (2001) fount that students’writings were informal, colloquial even speech-like despite the acceptability of grammar. While Eggins (1994) confirmed that English nominalization is the distinctive feature of written English and have functions to make the text more cohesive, concise, and objective and so on. Given that the use of nominalization and appropriate writing strategies are both effective ways to help learners improve their writing quality and performance, this thesis makes an attempt to explore the correlation between the adoption of writing strategies and the use of nominalization expressions.The research questions addressed in this study are "1)What strategies do learners of different English proficiency adopt in their composing activities?2) What is the distribution and frequency of the use of nominalization expressions in different proficient EFL Learners’ compositions?3) What is the relationship between the use of writing strategies and the distributions of nominalization expressions?SPSS16.0were applied to analyze the data. The findings are as follows1) The Descriptive Statistics shows the frequency of the use of students’writing strategies is at a medium level. Among six strategies group examined, compensation strategies are the most preferred and memory strategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, social strategies follows while the affective strategies are the least frequently used. Besides the general frequency of the use of the three nominalization are very low and far from satisfactory, but the frequency of the application of verbal nominalization expressions are the higher than that of the adjective and clausal nominalization expressions2) The Independent-Samples T-test reveals that the use of metacognitive strategies and affective strategies among high and low score group have significant differences; and there is significant difference in the use of verbal nominalization expressions as well as clausal nominalization expressions among high and low score group. In other word, the proficient writers can utilize the metacognitive strategies and affective strategies more frequently and effectively in the process of writing, and tend to apply more verbal nominalization and clausal nominalization in their compositions compared with the non-proficient writers.3) The Pearson Correlation Analysis reports that among proficiency group, memory strategies could have a significantly positive effect on the use of verbal nominalization expressions; the adoption of affective strategies could exert a negative impact on the application of adjective and clausal nominalization expressions; the utilization of social strategies can pose a negative effect on the use of clausal nominalization. While among non-proficient group, there is only one significantly negative correlation between the use of metacognitive strategies and the use of clausal nominalizationsThe findings of the study shed some light on the teaching of English writing for English majors in China. Teachers should motivate students to have more interaction with others and inspire students to be more active in communicating their writing problems or puzzles, and thus give relevant advice on the adoption of different writing strategies among different proficiency group to achieve a better effect in improving their writing quality. Teachers can also make a detailed analysis of the functions of the usage of the nominalization expression by instructing some academic discourse with an acceptable degree of formality and difficulty achieved by the use of nominalization expressions, and later let students do some translation exercises related to nominalization to enhance the consciousness of the use of these nominalizations. Furthermore when revising the students’ writing assignments, teachers can give some feedback on the conversion of some simple sentences into more diversified sentences with the use of some nominalization expressions, arousing students’awareness of the advantages of such change that can make their writing more well-knitted, concise, and diversified, improving their writing attainments. However, owing to the confinement of time and author’s capability, some limitations of this study require improving in follow-up research.