An Empirical Study Of The Correlation Among College Non-English Majors' Writing Motivation, Writing Strategies And Writing Proficiency

With the development of research on psycholinguistics and foreign language teaching, more and more attention has been paid to the characteristics of the learners. Language learners vary in many ways because they are affected by so many social and psychological factors. However, not much work has been done concerning the relationship among these three factors----motivation, strategies and proficiency, especially on writing motivation, writing strategies and writing proficiency.The purpose of this empirical study is to shed some light on English writing field and find some problems existing in English writing and provides some advice on English writing teaching.This thesis reports on a survey of the correlation among English writing motivation, writing strategies and writing proficiency. The subjects involved were 60 second-year Non-English majors from Beijing Language and Culture University. In this study, a questionnaire, which consists of personal information, motivation for English writing questionnaire and strategy for English writing questionnaire was administered to collect information about these learners' individual background, writing motivation and writing strategy. An English composition test was given to the students in class in order to collect their writing scores. Statistical analyses were conducted with SPSS 14.0.The overall average of writing motivation is 3.02 (the full score is 5). The order of the writing motivation intensity is "career (3.5763)>desire to communicate (3.3221)>grade (3.0424)>curiosity (3.0226)>desire to go abroad (2.6526)>writing avoidance (2.5085)". Among these six categories, only curiosity(r=.460**) is significantly correlated to writing proficiency, which means that it is very important to cultivate students' intrinsic motivation for English writing.The overall average of writing strategy is 2.87 (the full score is 5). Cognitive strategies (mean=3.3926) rank the highest. What follows is metacognitive strategies (mean 2.761.3) and social/affective strategics (mean=2.4500). Among these three categories, cognitive (r.514**) and metacognitive (r.4328**) strategies arc closely related to writing proficiency. The correlation between each individual strategy and writing proficiency is also studied. Out of 35 writing strategies, 11 strategies are positively correlated with writing proficiency.The writing motivation category--Curiosity is positively correlated with both Metacognitive strategies (r=.265*) and Cognitive strategics (r=.272*). That is to say, if students are "curiosity" motivated, they tend to use metacognitive and cognitive writing strategics to finish the writing task.Advice and suggestions based on the results and discussions are proposed with the hope that they could be of some value to English writing teaching.