A Study Of Mother-Tongue-Reliance Strategies In Adult English Writing

In the past decades, many researchers launched several studies on L1 use in the process of L2 writing. Many research achievements indicated that L1 played an important role in L2 writing. In China, Chinese researchers also conducted many studies to explore the role of Chinese in second language learners? English writing process. However, making a general view on the researches domestic and overseas, subjects of the studies above were all students ranging from junior school students to undergraduate students. Few researchers did research on social adults.Therefore, the present study focused on adults who study in adult English training school. It is expected to find the characteristics of use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies in adult English writing. More specially, the study aims at finding the answers to following questions:(1) Do the adult learners use mother-tongue-reliance strategies in the process of Englishwriting?(2) What is the relationship between L2 proficiency, objective factors(gender and age)and the use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies?(3) How do adult?s learners use mother-tongue-reliance strategies in the process of adultEnglish writing? And what are the characteristics of adult learners? use of mother-tongue-reliance?The 95 adult students from Shanxi Datong English training school were selected as the subjects of the study. The participants were invited to answer questionnaire and six of them were selected to take English writing test and accept interview. Combined with quantitative and qualitative method, the researcher analyzed the data of questionnaires, the samples of English writing and the contents of interview.The findings in this research are given as follows:Firstly, L2 writing is a bilingual process. They frequently adopted mother-tonguereliance strategies as learning strategies. Adult learners relied heavily on mother-tonguereliance strategies when they did writing task.Secondly, the study showed a negative correlation between L2 proficiency and the use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies which indicated that the higher L2 proficiency, the less use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies. Other objective factors, such as gender and age, showed no significant on the amount of mother-tongue-reliance strategies use. It indicated that the amount of use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies was not changing with different age and gender.Thirdly, with the different writing processes the amount of mother-tongue-reliance strategies? use was different. The adult learners adopted more mother-tongue-reliance strategies in process controlling and content organizing. In the process of structure design and word choosing, use of mother-tongue-reliance strategies decreased, but the amount was still higher than that of L2 use.Finally, in the process of practical English writing, both the high L2 proficiency and low L2 proficiency adults frequently employed the strategies of mother tongue in L2 writing. Meanwhile, the results manifested that the L2 proficiency did affect their writing process and use of mother tongue, especially in the process of word choosing. The results of the qualitative also indicated that the adults used L1 to comprehend and comment on the wr iting requirement, retrieve and review information relevant to the topic of the writing assignment, generate L2 sentences, structures and words, and consider various issues pertaining to the writing process. Therefore, effects of L1 use in the four processes did have obvious positive impacts on the writing product.The findings in this study provide a wide understanding of the use of mother-tonguereliance strategies in adult English writing. Furthermore, the present study supported data and information of the L2 writing process among adults which provide teachers with valuable information about how adult writers compose in L2 and what strengths they tend to present and what difficulties they tend to meet throughout writing. Due to the limitations of sample sizes and methodologies, the results in this study would serve as hypotheses and guidance to be further tested in the future.