Encouraging Self-monitoring In Writing By Chinese Non-English Majors

This thesis reports an empirical study on the use of self-monitoring technique among Chinese non-English majors. It examines the effectiveness of annotation-making training among these lower-to-intermediate English proficiency learners, investigates both the students' and the teacher's attitudes towards self-monitoring, reports the impact self-monitoring have on students' standards of good English writing, and examines the degree of consistency between students' performances in self-monitoring and their perceptions of self-monitoring.A total of 25 freshmen specializing in Chinese language from Nanjing Normal University participated in this study in 2005. Instruments employed in the study included three writing tasks, an annotation checklist, a questionnaire, interviews and videotaping as well. The whole experiment lasted for two months. Analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data yielded the findings as follows:1) Students could be trained to use the technique of self-monitoring in their writing. Through training, they began to read for higher order concerns (HOCs) while reading for lower order concerns (LOCs). In other words, self-monitoring proved to be effective in raising students' awareness of importance of content and organization to successful writing. Further, studies of annotations made in student writing showed that through training, students were growing in capability to specify their intentions in directing the teacher's feedback.2) In general, students thought self-monitoring was helpful. They believed it helped mainly with the improvement of the quality of their compositions and the development of a self-correction habit. Meanwhile, students agreed that self-monitoring increased their responsiveness to teacher feedback, provided opportunities for dialogue with the teacher, urged them to read their compositions critically and more or less developed their awareness of readers.3) Although students were positive towards the use of self-monitoring, disparity was found between their performances and perceptions when making annotations, especially in the terms of content and organization.