A Study Of The Use Of Writing Strategies By Chinese College EFL Learners From Discourse And Language Use Perspectives

Considered as the embodiment of English proficiency, writing has always been the gravity and difficulty of college English education. But the accomplishment of English teaching and learning seems unsatisfactory. Even though much effort and time have been expended on writing by students and teachers, it is still hard to achieve a good writing performance. According to the analysis report of college English tests, writing seems to be the most difficult part in English test. As a result, research on English writing has been of great importance. Some findings indicate there is a significant correlation between writing strategies and writing proficiency. However, some findings show little relationship can be found between writing strategies and writing proficiency. This phenomenon is, in the author’s knowledge, partly caused by the failure to reflect how Chinese students use writing strategies since questionnaires used in most studies on writing strategies are derived from language learning strategies, which are classified according to the nature of the strategies, such as metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, indirect strategies etc. Such classification can obscure the link between the use of strategies and the quality of writings. It is the author’s belief that a writing strategy questionnaire should be made in the light of writing assessment and writing difficulties so as to throw a light on the extent to which they exploit the writing strategies and meanwhile arm them with the knowledge relating the link between writing strategies and writing assessment.So author of this study composes a writing strategies questionnaire from the aspects of students’writing difficulties and writing assessment. Theoretically based on O’Malley theory of language learning, this questionnaire is revised and self-designed by referring to Wang Wenyu’s questionnaire of writing difficulties and Jacob’s Inventory for writing assessment. It comprises of four categories of writing strategies with forty-nine specific strategies.This study selected117sophomore students from Southwest Jiaotong University, aiming to answer the following questions:1) What is the overall status of writing strategies employment relating organization strategies, content strategies, vocabulary strategies and syntactic strategies?2) Dose there exist relationship between writing strategies and language proficiency? And if do, to what extend?3) To what extent does there exist significant difference in the use of writing strategies between successful learners and less successful learners?SPSS is applied to conduct analyzing procedures of data obtained. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and Independent Samples t-test are used. The findings are as follows:1) In general, students use all four categories of writing strategies when writing and the frequency of strategies employment reaches the level of "sometimes used". The employment frequency in descending order is as follows:structure strategies> content strategies> vocabulary strategies) syntactic strategies.2) Writing strategies are positively correlated with language proficiency and the degree of correlation in descending order is as follows:syntactic strategies>structure strategies> content strategies> vocabulary strategies. Among them, syntactic strategies have the highest degree of correlation, belonging to the level of significant correlation. The other three categories of strategies belong to the level of concrete correlation.3) Significant difference exists in the using of writing strategies between successful learners and less-successful learners. Successful learners use more writing strategies than less-successful learners do, especially in the use of syntactic strategies. Successful learners understand syntactic complexity better, conscious of outputting complex sentence such as reduced structures to improve writing performance. Weak in language proficiency, less-successful learners hold a vague understanding of syntactic complexity and have difficulty in manipulating complex syntax, resulting to poor writing performance and low language proficiency.To conclude, pedagogical implications from this study are as follows:1) In daily teaching activities, teacher help students shape the thought and habit of using writing strategies by means of introducing the concept of writing strategies.2) To meet the demands of written English, teachers need to encourage students using syntactic strategies and make them digest the concept of syntactic complexity and variety, particularly the understanding and employment of reduced structure.3) It is necessary for teachers to pay attention to grammar teaching. Only in this way, can students have mastery of complex structures and improve language proficiency from the syntactic aspects.