A Tentative Study Into The Level Of EFL Writing Strategies Used By The Senior High School EFL High Achievers And The Relationship Between Writing Strategy And Writing Tasks

This thesis is concerned about the responses, namely the EFL writing strategies which is used by the senior high school EFL high achievers (high achievers for short), to the writing tasks different in cognitive process - knowledge-telling oriented and knowledge-transforming oriented - to find out on which level the EFL writing strategy of this group of EFL learners has reached in the first place and to find out further if task acts as an element that would vary significantly the strategies used to solve the two tasks respectively, and if so, to provide more appropriate materials for strategy training for the classroom pedagogical instruction as well as the source to design better writing tasks in order to realize a more specified and thorough assessment on writing ability.The participants in this study involve 12 high achievers in an English training center in Guiyang at the semi-structured focus group interview session,30 high achievers in the same training center in the session of pilot testing of the questionnaire compiled based on the results of relevant studies, and 30 high achievers in EFL at the same level of English proficiency in a top senior high school in Guiyang in the formal test of the revised questionnaire.The instrument used in this research besides the interview and the questionnaire also includes two writing tasks used for the national entrance examination in the second volume of the National Matriculation English Test (NMETâ…¡for short) and in the volume of Shanghai Matriculation English Test (SMET for short), and the profiling scale of learning strategy designed by Oxford (1990), based on which the level of the writing strategies the participants can reach under the two tasks will be gained after their descriptive statistics were calculated by SPSS. With SPSS a Paired T-test was conducted to see if the strategies used under the two different tasks are significantly different from each other.The results of the research show that the strategy-use performance tends to be better or higher in terms of level when completing the knowledge-transforming-oriented (high in cognitive process or in cognitive demands) than when completing its knowledge-telling-oriented counterpart. And the strategies used when completing the knowledge-transforming-oriented task are significantly different from the strategies used when completing the knowledge-telling-oriented task on the whole considering the comparison of the total means. However as to the specific strategy, only the cognitive strategies are different from each other under the two tasks.The thesis also proposes the meaning of the research results for pedagogical practice. Apart from assessing the potential contribution of this research, the thesis indicates also the limitation of this research and put forward the suggestions for future research.