On The Effectiveness Of Writing Strategies In Developing14-15-Year-old Chinese ESL Learners’ Writing Ability

Language, as the main tool of cultural transmission and human communication, hasbeen studied in multi-dimensional ways. Scientific interest in human communication asa main field of linguistic study has increased over the last two decades and researchareas such as language acquisition and language ability have become more and moreimportant. When it comes to language ability, Bachman has demonstrated that"language ability has traditionally been considered, by language teachers and languagetesters alike, to consist of four skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing"(Bachman1996:74). As to the input and output of language, these four skills can bedivided into two groups: listening and reading belong to input; while speaking andwriting belong to the output of language. The increasing communication and exchangebetween China and the other countires makes English, the international language, moreand more important. In China, teaching learners on listening, speaking and reading hasdrawn enough attention as well. However, considering the importance of writing abilityand Chinese students’ weakness in English writing, this study aims to figure out themost eiffcient writing strategies by comparing the effectiveness of two strategies inpractical wirting tasks.The participants of this study are14-15-year-old Chinese ESL learners who stay intransitional stage from junior high school to senior high school. Two wirting strategies Iselected in this study are Julia’s (in James2000)8-step wirting strategy and Englert’s(1991) POWER strategy. Both writing strategies are designed based on Hayes andFlower’s (1989) theory of writing process but with different steps in guiding writing.According to their different functions, these two strategies can stand for two main kindsof writing strategies at present. The study included two questionnaires and two wirtingtests designed for sixty Chinese students who were chosen randomly from Grade3of amiddle school (30boys and30girls). These60students were divided randomly into3groups (10boys and10girls in each group), in which two groups were regarded as theexpeirmental groups with two wirting strategies instructed respectively and the otherone as the control group. Through the analysis of these questionnaires, the students’attitude to writing and the functions of wirting strategies were collected in order to keepthe two tests reliable and authentic. And then, the pre-test was used to evaluate thesestudents’ pirmary level of English wirting. Twenty days later, the post-test was cariredout and then three groups’ wirtings were collected and compared. The comparison of their wirting results between the two tests and among the three groups in the post-testshowed the effectiveness of the given writing strategy and the most suitable strategiesfor them.Two wirting strategies were chosen for this study according to the research objects’English level and cognitive capability. According to the instructions in the Syllabus of9-year Compulsory Education in China(教育部2002)，the sixty research objects chosenin a Chinese middle school represented the average level of Chinese ESL learners. Theanalysis of their results in both tests focused on the content of their writings and writingelements, such as: vocabulary, grammar, organization. The combination of Hughes’holistic and analytic scoring was applied in this study, in addition, the standard forevaluating English writing in senior high school entrance examination of Henanprovince (see Appendix6) was also employed so as to achieve high reliability of theevaluation of the subject’s writings. Based on the qualitative research, it is manifestedthat, compared with the pre-test, two experimental groups made more obvious progressin the post-test than the control group and the effectiveness of the wirting strategieswere demonstrated as well. Moreover, through the compairson between twoexpeirmental groups in the post-test, it is concluded that, the8-step writing strategy ismore effective in improving students’ writing structure, sentences variety and languageorganization. Therefore, the8-step writing strategy is shown to be the more effectiveone for14-15-year-old Chinese ESL learners.