An Investigation Into The Influence Of English Writing Strategy On Senior High School Students' Writing Proficiency

As one of the four perplexing abilities of EFL learning,writing plays an important role in senior high school students' English learning.However,it has been neglected in senior high school EFL teaching to a large extent.In consequence,how to help learners improve their English writing proficiency has drawn great attention from EFL teachers and researchers.Writing strategies have an important impact on students' writing proficiency and the research of writing strategies is conducive to improving students' English proficiency and language level.This study uses writing tasks,questionnaires and interviews to explore writing strategies used by senior high school students,including what writing strategies are employed,the differences between high-level and low-level achievers in the use of writing strategies ae well as the relationship between the use of writing strategies and writing proficiency.The author began by giving an overview of the current writing strategies research at home and abroad.Drawing on Liu's(2006)classification of writing strategies and Petric and Czarl's(2003)questionnaire on writing strategies,a writing questionnaire for Chinese students is revised and formulated,which includes learning strategies and output strategies.The former one includes cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies as well as social and affective strategies.While output strategy includes organizational strategy and linguistic strategy.The participants were 98 students from two classes of Jinggangshan Middle School in Jiangxi Province.Among them,the top 20 students in writing tasks were defined as high-level group while the 20 students who got lower scores than other 78 students were considered as low-level group.The data included their scores in three English writing tasks,the results of questionnaires on English writing strategies and interview protocols.Software Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS)17.0 was used by the author.The author firstly analyzed the means of strategy use,then ran an independentsample t-test and correlation.The results show that:(1)The students use linguistic strategies more frequently than the other four categories which comprise cognitive strategies,organizational strategies,metacognitive strategies and social and affective strategies.(2)Proficient writers use strategies more frequently than those who are not proficient in writing,except for emotional strategies.Significant differences in the use of metacognitive strategies and language strategies were found between two groups and difference in metacognitive strategies is remarkably significant.(3)Metacognitive strategies and linguistic strategies are positively correlated with writing proficiency.Based on the findings,this paper explores some pedagogical implications for improving senior high school students' English writing proficiency.It is imperative that both EFL learners and teachers should not neglect the essential role of English writing strategies in English writing proficiency.