A Study Of Non-english Majors’ English Writing Strategy Training

English writing, as a significant output activity, not only reflects students’ comprehensive language performance, but also plays an important role in English teaching and learning. Yet, the development of writing abilities is far from being satisfactory in the pedagogical practice. On the one hand, the quality of students’ writing is much lower than required. For example, there exist different problems in terms of vocabulary, organization, language use and the way of thinking pattern in their writing. On the other hand, students show little interest in writing practice. This situation can be mainly accounted for their insufficient storage of writing knowledge and unawareness of effective writing strategies use. In view of this issue, it is necessary to guide students to use some of the essential writing strategies by strategy training. Though considerable progress has been made concerning studies on language learning strategies at home and abroad,most of them are conducted on theoretical level. There are relatively fewer empirical studies on English writing strategy training.The present study, based on the theory of language learning strategy and the approach of strategy training put forwards by Oxford et al.(1990), focuses on exploring the effects of writing strategy training on students’ writing ability development, detecting the individual differences between skilled and less skilled learners and observing the changes of students’ attitudes towards writing after the strategy instruction. This study, being embedded in the real classroom setting,lasts for 14 weeks. The subjects are 80 freshmen of non-English majors from two natural classes.The experimental class accepts the writing strategy training while the control class receives the traditional way of writing instruction. The research data, collecting from the writing pre-test and post-test, questionnaire, and the writing diaries, are analyzed in quantitative and qualitative ways.The results of the writing tests and questionnaires are processed by SPSS 17.0 to compare the differences of the two classes in writing scores, strategy use and the attitudes changes. In addition, students’ reflective writing diaries supply with the qualitative data for induction of the more specific individual differences in writing strategy use.The final research results show that writing strategy training positively affects non-English majors’ writing abilities. Compared with the students of the control class, the students in the experimental class could use more writing strategies and the frequency of strategy use is improved significantly. Meanwhile, the overall writing proficiency of experimental class in the post-test is also enhanced greatly. Though the correlation between writing strategy use and the other different aspects of writing covered by scoring criteria are varied, the organization, contentand language use of experimental class in the post-test writing are considerably promoted. The result also reveals that the skilled learners and less skilled learners in the experimental class are significantly different concerning the use of metacognitive strategy and affective strategy. After receiving strategy training, skilled learners are more liable to employ brainstorming, monitoring,evaluating and a series of affective strategies. Besides, the result of questionnaire also indicates that the students’ attitude towards writing is positively transformed in the end, which is mainly embodied in their interest, confidence, motivation and beliefs in effective writing.Of course, in the present study, there are unavoidably some deficiencies due to the short period of the experiment and the relatively small number of the subjects. However, the experimental study presents a relatively proper and beneficial model of writing strategy training for English teachers in the classroom setting. It not only expands the research areas of writing strategy on theory but also offers some constructive suggestions for developing students’ English writing abilities in practice. Therefore, the present study sheds bright light on the college English teaching in China.