Investigating Chinese Senior High School Students’ Writing Strategy Use And The Relationship Between Strategy Use And Writing Proficiency

Writing plays an important role in English learning for Chinese EFL senior high school students; yet, many of them could not write well and how to help their writing has attracted numerous teachers and researchers’ attention. Writing strategies have been found to be an important factor influencing their writing ability and therefore, research on writing strategies are beneficial to students’ English writing. This study uses questionnaires and interviews to investigate a bunch of Chinese senior high school students’ strategy use, including what writing strategies they use, the differences in their strategy use between skilled and less-skilled writers, and the relationship between strategy use and writing proficiency.This thesis first reviews studies on the writing process, learning strategies, and writing strategies. Drawing on Oxford’s(1990) classification of learning strategies and Petric and Czarl’s writing strategy questionnaire, the author revised a writing strategy questionnaire designed by a Chinese scholar to cater for senior high school students. The questionnaire was administered in two classes(the Olympic class and the regular class) in the Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University, and 86 valid questionnaires were collected.Students from the Olympic class are regarded as skilled writers while students from the regular class are less-skilled writers. Data included their scores in three English exams, their questionnaire data, and their interview protocols.With the Software Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS) 20.0, the author first analyzed the means of their strategy use, then ran a independent-sample t-test, correlation, and multiple regressions of the two groups’ data. The results showed that(1) Students often used compensation strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and social strategies in their writing process. Affective and metacognitive strategies received relatively insufficient attention.(2) The frequencies of skilled writers’ strategy use were usually higher than less-skilled writers, except for affective strategies. Also there were significantly differences in their use of memory strategies, cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies.(3) Memory strategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies and social strategies are positively correlated with writing proficiency. There is a high positive correlation between metacognitive and cognitive strategies and writing proficiency.(4) Writing strategies have predictive power for students’ writing achievements. Metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and memory strategies identified in this study have significant predictive power for the writing achievements.It is hoped that the study will provide useful suggestions for students’ learning to write. The thesis ends with its implications for strategy training teaching English writing in high school.