A Study Of The Correlation Between English Writing Strategies And Writing Proficiency Of Senior High School Students

English writing is a core language skill as well as a weak link in the practice ofEnglish teaching. Writing is a good reflection of students’ mastery of languagelearning, thus, researches on EFL writing have called great attention in recent years.Among the influencing factors of writing, writing strategies are significant onescontributing to the students’ writing proficiency. The present study is designed toexplore what types of writing strategies the senior high school students use in theirwriting process which are most effective to improve the students’ writing proficiencyand find the correlation between writing strategies use and the writing proficiency,which aims to provide some suggestions to English writing teaching.The instruments adopted in this study consist of a required English writing task,a Chinese version questionnaire about English writing strategies and an interview. Thesubjects of the investigation were105students from one senior high middle school ofInner Mongolian Autonomous Region. They were required to write a given topiccomposition in their usual class time, which was used to measure these students’writing proficiency. The questionnaire was used to investigate the students’ usage ofEnglish writing strategies. An interview severed as a supplement. SPSS17.0wasadministered to deal with the statistical analysis.The major findings have been produced as follows:Firstly, cognitive strategies are most frequently used with metacognitivestrategies the next while the social/affective strategies have been paid the leastattention. In term of the specific writing strategies, the topic-clarifying strategy is usedmost frequently by senior high school students. The least frequently used strategyinvestigated is exchanging feelings with other people.Secondly, high-score students distinguish themselves from low-score students intheir use of metacognitive strategies. The high-score students do make use of thestrategies of extra practicing, imitating model written, thinking in English rather thanChinese and considering the appropriateness of the content.Thirdly, among the three types of writing strategies, only metacognitivestrategies and cognitive strategies are related to the students’ English writingproficiency, while the calculation of the correlation coefficient between social/affective strategies and writing proficiency fails to produce any statically significant. As for the specific writing strategies, there are seven individual writing strategiespositively related to the students’ writing achievement with the other two strategies’negative influences on them.Pedagogical implications were discussed based on the results and analysis. Bothstudents and their English teachers should emphasize the positive role of Englishwriting strategies. Writing strategies training should be applied in the process ofwriting teaching.