A Study Of The Relationship Among English Writing Strategies, Vocabulary Size And Writing Quality Of Senior High School Students

English writing is a core language skill in second language acquisition and it reflects learners’comprehensive knowledge and communicative competence. Recently, researchers from home and abroad have paid great attention to EFL writing. Most of the studies focus on the factors influencing writing proficiency, among which vocabulary knowledge and writing strategies are frequently investigated. However, the relationship among vocabulary knowledge, writing strategies and writing quality has rarely been explored. Moreover, the author finds out that senior high school students are often neglected by most scholars who usually take the college students as the target group. Therefore, the present study is conducted to find out senior high school students’writing quality, vocabulary size, EFL writing strategies use and further explore the relationship among English vocabulary size, EFL writing strategies and EFL writing quality.The instruments employed in this study include an English vocabulary test, a required English writing task and a Chinese version questionnaire of English writing strategies designed on the basis of Mu’s (2005) classification of writing strategies. SPSS 19.0 is employed to analyze the collected data.The major findings are as follows. Firstly, senior high school students’receptive vocabulary size turns out to be larger than productive vocabulary size, since productive vocabulary requires more devotion and efforts. As for the correlation between vocabulary size and writing proficiency, they correlate with each other on a whole. Productive vocabulary size proves to be strongly correlated with EFL writing quality while receptive vocabulary size is loosely correlated with writing achievement.Secondly, senior high school students adopt five types of writing strategies. Cognitive strategies are the most frequently used one, followed by meta-cognitive strategies, communicative strategies, rhetorical strategies and social/affective strategies. With regard to specific writing strategies, organization strategies, planning strategies and translation strategies are the most frequently adopted ones. The least frequently used strategies are the getting feedback strategies. When it comes to the correlation between writing strategies and writing quality, cognitive, rhetorical and communicative strategies are positively correlated with writing quality while the calculation of the correlation among meta-cognitive strategies, social/affective strategies and writing proficiency does not produce any statistical significance. In specific, organization strategies, planning strategies, generating strategies, revising strategies, avoidance strategies and resourcing strategies positively correlate with writing proficiency. Meanwhile, translation strategies and anxiety strategies exert negative influence on writing quality.Thirdly, as vocabulary size and English writing strategies are two individual factors belonging to different domains, there turns out to be no correlation between English vocabulary size and writing strategies. Hence, senior high school students with a large vocabulary size are not necessarily skilled in adopting writing strategies.Lastly, there are significant differences in English vocabulary size between high-achievers and low-achievers. Moreover, high-score students are different from the low-score students in the use of rhetorical and cognitive writing strategies.Based on the research results, the study provides some pedagogical implications for both teachers and students. Teachers should emphasize the importance of vocabulary size and writing strategies and train the students to employ writing strategies effectively. Senior high school students should realize the significant role of vocabulary size and writing strategies and apply what they’ve learned into practice.