The Countryside Junior Middle School English Writing Strategies

The new curriculum standard pays special attention to cultivating students’ learningstrategies and developing students’ autonomous learning ability. Writing strategy, a way toimprove students’ English writing competence, plays a key role in their English overallcompetence. English writing strategy, as an effective way to improve students’ writing ability,has been recognized by many teachers and scholars and used in practical teaching. Butauthoritative theories which guide scholars to do research in this field have not come into beingyet. Junior school students are in the beginning stage of English study, which is a key period tothem. Their performance during this period of time would produce a significant influence ontheir further study. In our country, few researches have been done in this respect. Thereby, thispaper chooses junior3students of a rural school as the research subject, in the hope that theresult in this research could draw the attention of other scholars and more significant findings inthe field can be made.Tools in this research include questionnaire, interview and analysis of exam papers.Subjects of the questionnaire are120students from two classes. Subjects of the interview are4boys and6girls chosen randomly from the120students. The final term papers are collected andanalyzed. Questionnaire can show their performance by means of different writing strategies.Interview helps collect information about the reason why students can not use these strategiesappropriately. Also, the interview can help check the accuracy of the questionnaire result. Theanalysis of exam papers can show the students’ English level, especially their writing marks anduse of writing strategies. The study finally shows that use of writing strategies in this school isunsatisfactory. Meta-cognitive strategies are used the most by students, while social/affectivestrategies are used the least, which results many factors including teachers, students, school andstudying environment. Suggestions are given to deal with these problems, to enhance their basicknowledge and skill, to enlarge their language input, to improve writing feedback, to designwriting course elaborately, to enhance autonomous learning, to take advantage of first languagecorrectly. One purpose of this research is to enable the teachers to see that writing strategy is aneffective way to improve students’ writing competence and to guide teachers to observe theirstudents’ carefully, realize students’ needs and improve their teaching of writing. The otherpurpose is to enrich the empirical researches in our country, thus to offer some statistic andreferences to further researches.