An Experimental Study On Relationship Between Self-monitoring Strategy Training And Students’ English Writing Proficiency In A Junior High School

In recent years, writing plays an increasingly significant role in EFL instruction. As animportant part in the four language skills, writing can partially embody learners’comprehensive competence of language. However, it is evident that writing is alwaysconsidered as the hard nut to crack in EFL teaching and learning. As a language output skill,writing is an active and complex activity, the improvement of which is slow and actually aprocess from quantitative change to qualitative change. However, teachers in the traditionalEFL instruction pay much attention to the writing product rather than the process. Withoutsystematic and effective training in writing, students are passive to “touch pen”. Thus, theaccumulation of quantity does not result in qualitative change. Writing is still a big headache,even a “nightmare” haunting in many EFL learners’ minds, Since1980s, the focus of EFLinstruction has turned from “how to teach” to “how to learn” with the establishment oflearner-centered notion of instruction. Moreover, the key point of “how to learn” lies in themastery and application of learning strategies. With the in-depth research of learningstrategies, the role of metacognitive strategy in language learning is increasingly emphasizedby educators. As a basic metacognitive strategy, self-monitoring strategy is a higher-level one,which refers to monitoring and regulating consciously the learning tasks, behaviors andstrategies. Recently, more and more scholars and EFL educators have applied self-monitoringstrategy to EFL instruction. But there are few researches on the relationship between theapplication of self-monitoring strategy and EFL writing. And most of the researches relate tocollege students, senior high students. It is rare that students in junior high schools areinvolved in such researches. For this purpose, the thesis is a study on the employment ofself-monitoring strategy in EFL writing instruction in a junior high school with an intention toimprove the students’ writing performance.100students of Grade Nine from two classes of Taihang Middle school in Changzhi ofShanxi Province participate in the study. One class is chosen to be the experimental class (EC)and the other class is the control class (CC). A four-month SMS-training-based Englishwriting instruction is carried out on the experimental class. The students’ use ofself-monitoring strategies is considered in the following aspects, namely planning and makingpreparations before writing, monitoring behavior while writing and evaluating theperformance after writing. While students in the control class still receive regular instructionwithout the training of self-monitoring strategy. Through the experiment, the study intends to answer the following three questions:1) Will the SMS training make contribution to raisingstudents self-monitoring awareness of English writing and improving their interest in Englishwriting?2) Do good SMS learners gain better proficiency in English writing than poor SMSlearners?3) Will SMS training improve the students’ writing proficiency as far as the content,organization and language in their compositions are concerned? After the experiment, bothqualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyze the results of the training. The mainfindings are summarized as follows:Based on the investigation and analysis of two classes’ performance in self-monitoringstrategy questionnaires, the study finds that the experimental class uses self-monitoringstrategy much better and students are interested in EFL writing than the control class.Through comparing the results of the two writing tests, the experimental class makes asignificant better performance in the posttest. Besides, through the training, the participantsget a better understanding of the recursive processes of writing and especially the importanceof content, organization and language in writing so as to change their focus during writingprocess and better their written products, which leads to the improvement of students’ writingproficiency. Therefore, it is suggested that self-monitoring strategy integrated into theinstruction of EFL writing in junior high schools.