A Study Of Writing Strategy Use By Non-English Majors In A Vocational Institute

The present study aims at investigating non-English majors' writing strategy use (WSU) and its relationship to writing achievement (WA) by analyzing the WSU and WA of 113 students of grade 2004 from Shandong Politico-Legality Management Cadre Institute. The instruments include a writing test and a writing strategy questionnaire. The former is used to measure the students' writing achievements. The latter is adopted to investigate the students' WSU. It is formed on the basis of the writing strategy questionnaire by the Hungarian researchers, B. Petric & B. Czarl. The author made some minor revisions to Petric & Czari's writing strategy questionnaire so that it would suit this study. According to the three writing stages identified by the process theory of writing, the writing strategies in the questionnaire can first be classified into three types of stage strategies: pre-writing strategies, while-writing strategies and revising strategies. Then, the author introduces Oxford's six groups of strategies and further classifies the stage strategies into strategy groups, that is, the pre-writing strategies include the metacognitive and cognitive strategy groups; the while-writing strategies include the metacognitive, cognitive, memory, social and compensation strategy groups; the revising strategies include the metacognitive, cognitive, memory, social and affective strategy groups, hi addition, in order to get a more detailed understanding of the strategy use in the process of writing, the author adopts Oxford's classification of strategy groups into individual strategies. For example, the metacognitive strategy group can be further classified into such individual strategies as the organizing strategy, the planning strategy, the goal-setting strategy and the self-monitoring strategy. With the software Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), the author conducted analyses of comparison of means, t-tests, correlations as well as multiple regressions. The results indicate: 1) Ranked in terms of total frequency, stage strategies used by the subjects are while-writing strategies, pre-writing strategies and revising strategies; 2) Pre-writing strategies positively correlate with students' writing achievements (i.e., the overall compositionscores) and the content scores of their compositions respectively; 3) Revising strategies positively correlate with language scores; 4) As far as individual strategies are concerned, those positively correlated with content scores include: the overviewing strategy and the organizing strategy within the metacognitive strategy group in the pre-writing stage; the goal-setting strategy within the metacognitive strategy group and the approximating strategy within the compensation strategy group in the while-writing stage; 5) Individual strategies negatively correlated with content scores include: the self-monitoring strategy within the metacognitive strategy group and the resourcing strategy within the cognitive strategy group in the while-writing stage; 6) Individual strategies correlated with language scores include the self-monitoring strategy within the metacognitive strategy group and the repeating strategy within the cognitive strategy group in the revising stage; 7) Writing strategies have no predictive power for writing achievement, but have little predictive power for the content of students' writing; 8) High achievers and low achievers differ significantly in the use of some writing strategies; in the pre-writing stage and the while-writing stage high achievers more frequently use those strategies which positively correlate with content scores, and in the revising stage they more often use the repeating strategy. The study also attempts to analyze factors such as educational background, learning environment and language proficiency that may contribute to students' use of writing strategies.