Investigation Into The Writing Strategies Of Chinese EFL College Students From The Perspective Of Sociocultural Theory: A Case Study

With China's entry into WTO,2008 Olympic Games hosted in Beijing, and 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, the communication between China and the world has been strengthening in recent years. College students meet with increasing opportunities to express their opinions and feelings in the English language. English writing ability has become one of the most important standards for the qualification of personnel in the 21st century. English writing instruction, however, is overlooked by teachers and schools. Students dislike writing and do not practice writing except for the exams.Previous studies on writing strategy research mainly adopted the cognitive paradigm, centering on the classification of writing strategies and on the relations between students'achievements and writing strategies. Although in the recent years, traditional cognitive writing instruction added some elements to teaching such as writing purposes, writing process and even context, writing strategies are still fundamentally considered as cognitive processing. In recent 30 years, the emergence and development of Sociocultural Theory provides us with more dimensions and perspectives to explore writing strategy research, which shed a ray of new light on writing strategy research as well as the teaching and learning of writing.The theoretical basis of the present research is the Sociocultural Theory, put forward by the former Soviet psychologist Vygotsky held that the social dimension of consciousness is primary in time and fact, and the individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary. In other words, the mental comes after the social and was determined by the social. The cognitive capacity is not innate and inherent, but constructed by society, and the language is not arbitrary, but a historical and cultural product. The central concept of Sociocultural Theory is that higher forms of human mental activity are mediated. Mediation is the central construct of Sociocultural Theory and is a key to understanding the sociocultural approach. Humans are not restricted to direct simple stimulus-response reflexes and humans do not act directly upon the physical world but depend on tools and symbolic tools, or signs, to mediate and regulate our relationships with others as well as with ourselves. Mediation is referred to indirect, facilitated connections that humans are able to make between incoming stimulation and their responses (Luria,1976). Mediation is realized via two means:technical tools or tools and psychological tools or signs (e.g., language) (Vygotsky,1978).From the perspective of Sociocultural Theory, the present stuady adopts its central concept of mediation to explore non-English majors'strategy use in their after-class writing activities and probe the effects of learning context on writing learning. The elective writing course being studied adopted the process approach, emphasizing the whole writing process and writing practice, supplemented by writing skills and strategies. The present research uses a qualitative method to describe and analyze participants'writing strategy use in their after-class writing practices, as well as the effect of past writing learning context on participants by comparing their previous and present learning context. The researcher followed the whole class process, observing and analyzing the instructors'teaching method, teaching process, students'response. The three participants were chosen and required to write a composition of more than 200 words within three hours. The instruments applied in the present study are interviews, stimulated recall, and process logs so as to record the whole writing process and details of students writing actions.The researcher made an in-depth analysis of the collected data and came out with valuable findings. The researcher makes a comparison between students'past writing learning experience and the present one in terms of instructors, textbooks, teaching method and community, and concludes that classroom teaching context plays a vital role in students'writing learning. Marginalized and neglected classroom writing in high school and in college has a destructive influence on learners'writing learning, render them miss the good opportunity to develop and refine their writing. By contrast, in the elective writing class, classroom context was relatively favorable, and learners actively participated in the writing process with resources at hand and made marked progress. In addition, the researcher analyzes writing strategy use in after-class writing on the basis of mediation concept, the central construct of Sociocultural Theory. The results show that non-English majors mainly mediated their writing with Internet, online dictionary, L1, and evaluation criteria, which displayed some distinctive features compared with English majors. Classroom learning context, culture-specific artifact and learners'social interaction play a decisive part in students learning and understanding cognitive writing strategy in a deeper level. The present research examines three non-English majors' writing strategy use from the perspective of Sociocultural Theory, incorporating Sociocultural Theory with writing strategy use, which provides a new window to explore writing strategy. Moreover, the research takes non-English majors as the participants, which broadens and deepens the scope of vision in comparison with previous studies. In addition, the research discovers that writing learning context is decisive to construct learners' writing strategy. And the focus of writing instruction should be transformed from stressing training writing skills to establishing cultivating a favorable and comprehensive learning context and doing more real writing practices. Thus, learners are able to master writing with artifacts in the process of social interaction.