A Study On The Relationship Between Senior High School Students’ English Writing Strategies And Writing Competence

As an output skill,English writing is always viewed as a difficult part in senior high school English teaching and learning.In recent years,many researchers have studied English writing competence and have made profound achievements.Their findings show that there are many factors which could affect students’ writing competence,and writing strategy is one of the factors,which is very important in students’ writing competence improvement.Based on these findings,this study is to explore the relationship between senior high school students’ English writing strategies and writing competence.Quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to solve the following research questions:（1）What is the current state of senior high school students’ use of English writing strategies and writing competence?（2）Is students’ English writing competence significantly correlated to their writing strategies use?（3）What are the differences in writing competence among students with different frequencies of use of writing strategies? The research subjects are 50 students in the same class from Affiliated Middle School of Nantong University.The research instruments include a writing strategies questionnaire,a writing competence test and an interview.Subjects are required to complete the writing strategies questionnaire which is used to measure the current state of students’ use of English writing strategies.Besides,students need to write an English composition in terms of the reading material.Students’ writing competence is divided into four dimensions and given by the software i Write.The interview aims to give a supplement and to explain the data better for the study.According to the classification of English writing competence proposed by Professor Liang Maocheng in 2020,this study measures students’ writing competence from the four aspects,language,content,organization and mechanics.And this study divides writing strategies into cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies and affective strategies in accordance with O’Malley and Chamot’ view.The author first adopts SPSS25.0 software to conduct a descriptive analysis of the collected writing strategies questionnaire and writing competence test,and then makes specific analyses of the correlation and difference between the two factors.The major findings of this study are listed as follows.Firstly,the use of writing strategies by the subjects is at moderate frequency in this school.Among the three categories of writing strategies,metacognitive strategy is most frequently employed with cognitive strategy as the second,and affective strategy has been paid the least attention.Secondly,the current status of the senior high school students’ whole writing competence reaches a moderate level.To be specific,ranking these four writing competences from top to the bottom is mechanics competence,content competence,organization competence and language competence.Thirdly,students’ writing strategies is significantly and positively related with their writing competence on language,content and organization in terms of the data analysis,excluding the mechanics competence.Finally,from the perspective of language competence,there is a significant difference between students’ group with moderate use frequency of writing strategies and high use frequency of writing strategies.And the difference in content competence between students’ group with moderate use frequency of writing strategies and high use frequency of writing strategies is obviously significant.However,with regard to organization competence and mechanics competence,the difference among the three groups of writing strategies use doesn’t reach a significant level.On the basis of the findings above,a conclusion can be drawn that the frequency of English writing strategies use has an important influence on students’ writing competence.Implications are given based on the results and findings.Both English teachers and students should attach much importance to the English writing strategies.English teachers need a systematic training about writing strategies using and teaching,which help students better apply them during English writing so as to enhance their English writing competence.Students also need to apply writing strategies in their daily English writing to constantly improve their writing competence.