A Study Of Effects Of Writing Strategies On College English Writing

English writing, as one of students’ output skills and a way of communication, plays a significant role in English teaching and learning. As Professor Li Funing said “I believe that one must have a good command of writing in order to learn English well as it reflects learners’ ability to use language”. In accordance with the requirements of college English teaching syllabus, non-English majors are not only required to have a certain knowledge of writing and master some effective writing strategies, but to write a complete, clear and coherent composition no less than 120 words within half an hour. The data concerned indicates many students fail in their exams, jobs, study abroad due to the lack of writing skills. Some may have ideas to write, but they have not mastered sufficient writing skills to organize them in a logical way. Some may feel anxious and even reluctant to write when assigned writing tasks. Therefore, how to enhance non-English majors’ writing skills and improve their poor performance is a great challenge and of practical guiding significance for English teachers and applied linguists.Writing strategy is an indispensable part of learning strategy. Based on the theories of language learning strategies, Petric & Czarl defined writing strategies as “actions or behaviors consciously carried out by writers in order to make their writing more efficient”. Since then, it has received much attention from linguists abroad and at home. Various studies on writing strategy have been made and many recent researches show that writing strategies definitely promote learners’ writing proficiency. However, there are still some aspects that deserve more exploration such as what writing strategies have effective impact on the improvement of writing proficiency, and which factors would affect the use of writing strategies. Subsequently, the author attempts to finger out the above questions by analyzing questionnaires and interviews.The subjects of this study are 167 non-English sophomores from Chengdu University of Technology and this paper attempts to answer the following questions:(1) What writing strategies do students usually use in the process of English writing?(2)What are the reasons for the frequent use of writing strategies?(3) What writing strategies would improve writing proficiency better? The results of questionnaire are analyzed by SPSS and complemented by individual interviews. Through data collection and analysis, the main conclusions of the research are drawn as follows: generally speaking, non-English sophomores employ writing strategies at a medium frequency level, which manifests there is a large room for improvement. Among the four writing strategies, they prefer to use compensation strategies mostly, cognitive and social-affective strategies second, and meta-cognitive strategies the least. Besides, learners’ anxiety and motivation are main reasons for the utilization of writing strategy. What’s more, it is easy to find that the use of writing strategies is positively correlated with writing proficiency. In other words, the more writing strategies students use, the higher writing proficiency they would achieve. Among the four strategies, cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies are very positively correlated with writing proficiency at 0.01 level, and more effective learners also demonstrate certain cognitive and meta-cognitive behaviors in the process of language learning.Finally, analyzing the questionnaire and interviews, the author finds out some constructive enlightenments on English writing training. Firstly, increasing comprehensible input is an effective way for promoting students’ writing proficiency. In addition, writing strategies can be instructed and integrated in daily English class to build learners’ awareness of strategy use. Lastly, cooperative learning and peer review should be advocated and encouraged to lower anxiety, stimulate interest and strengthen learning motivation as well as to lighten burden on teachers to some extent.