A Comparative Study Of English Writing Strategy Use Between High-score Group And Low-score Group Of English Majors

As one of the output skills in EFL learning, writing has been considered as an important factor to measure learners’language proficiency and is also the weakest aspect in EFL teaching. Despite the abundance of the researches on English writing, most of the proceeding studies focus on "how to teach" and neglect "how to learn".In the 1970s, there has been a shift in focus from "how to teach" to "how to learn" in the area of foreign language teaching. Given this shift in focus, some scholars began to pay attention to the important role of English writing strategies. To date, there is still relatively little research into writing strategies in China, let alone researches into the differences on the writing strategy use by learners with different writing proficiency levels in this field.Based on the literature review, the present study chooses 107 English majors from SWPU as the subjects and involves both quantitative and qualitative methods, adopting three instruments-questionnaire, interview and mock tests for English Majors-Band 4. According to the average scores of composition part of two mock tests for English Majors-Band 4,28 students at the top are classified as high-score group writers and 30 students at the bottom are classified as low-score group writers. The questionnaire is used to collect quantitative data on writing strategy use of 107 sophomores majoring in English in SWPU and Package for the Social Science (SPSS 17.0) is adopted to run all the statistical analysis in the present study which involves descriptive statistics, independent t-test and Pearson correlation analysis. To obtain more adequate information about the reasons behind their writing strategy use,10 of the 107 subjects are selected to take part in the semi-structured interviews. In total, three research questions are addressed in the present study:1). What writing strategies are employed by English majors and how frequently do the English majors employ these strategies in English writing?2). What are the differences in writing strategy use between high-score group and low-score group writers and the reasons for the differences?3). Is there any relationship between writers’ writing proficiency and their writing strategy use?The study produces significant findings in relation to the research questions:1).The total means of the use of the three categories of writing strategies described in a descending order are:while-writing strategies, pre-writing strategies, after-writing strategies, among which use of the three categories of writing strategies all fall into medium strategy use. However, as for the individual strategy use, some are used with rather low total means such as cooperating strategies, self-evaluating strategies(especially during after-writing stage), self-rewarding strategies and so on.2).As to the differences in writing strategy use between high-score group and low-score group writers, in general, the means of the use of all the writing strategies by high-score group writers are higher than those by low-score group writers. To be specific, there do exist significant differences between two groups in the employment of pre-writing strategies, while-writing strategies, after-writing strategies respectively.3).The present study also reveals that the correlative relationship between writing proficiency and writing strategy use as a whole is significant. Furthermore, significant correlative relationship has also been discovered between writing proficiency and the use of while-writing strategies, pre-writing strategies, after-writing strategies respectively.Finally, based on the above results, this thesis provides some suggestions for the teaching of English writing for reference and discussion. Besides, limitations of the present research and suggestions for future research are also put forward.