An Empirical Study On Influences Of Writing Motivation And Strategy On College English Writing

This study is an empirical research about the correlation among English writing motivation, English writing strategies and English writing performance. The purpose of the current study are to understand the interrelationship of writing motivation, writing strategies and writing performance; the major differences between successful and unsuccessful writers'use of writing motivation and strategies; the most frequently employed strategies and the least employed ones and whether writing strategy training can improve writing performance or not.The subjects involve in the study are 91 students of Shenyang Normal University. They are in the first term of their second year college study, majoring in mathematics, education techonology, education, applied psychology and journalism. After the survey, the number of the subjects is narrowed down to 79. The instruments include questionnaire and English writing performance test. SPSS 16.0 is used for data analysis. The research results show that among the seven categories of writing motivation, only "writing interests" and "desire to write" have a positive relation with writing performance. "purpose of writing" and "writing avoidance" have a negative relation with writing performance. In addition, among the 26 individual writing motivation items,9 of them have a positive correlation with English writing. Such as, item 2 "obtain the achievement of creation", item 8 "attractive writing materials" and so on. Among the six categories of writing strategies, "memory strategies", "cognitive strategies", "metacognitive strategies" and "social strategies" are positively related to writing performance. In addition, among the 40 individual writing strategy items,25 of them have a positive relation with English writing. Such as, item 9 "consider the cohension between sentences and the organization structure", item 27 "make a writing plan for myself" and so on.Results of the survey also show that "writing interests", "writing for communication", "desire to write", "function of writing" and "desire to go abroad" have a positive correlation with writing strategies. "Purpose of writing" and "writing avoidance" have a negative relationship with writing strategies. We also see that there are significant differences between successful and unsuccessful writers on "writing interests", "desire to write" and "writing avoidance", and on "metacognitive strategies", "cognitive strategies" and "social strategies". In addition, the results of the analysis of writing scores between compared and experimental classes show that writing strategy training exerts positive effects on writing performance.Results of this study will exert positive effects on English writing teaching of non-English majors, help teachers to have thorough understanding of the writing motivation and strategies used by college non-English majors, and find out the difference of using writing motivation and writing strategies between successful writers and unsuccessful writers. By doing this, teachers can shoot at the target during writing strategy training, so as to enhance students' learning capacity and English performance.