An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Social-affective Strategy On Senior Middle School Students' English Writing Level

In second language acquisition social-affective strategy is playing important role in the development of learners' language learning interest and autonomy. Social-affective strategy helps learners get more contact with the language through interaction and helps students adapt their own emotions, motivations and attitudes to better language learning. In previous researches social-affective strategy didn't get the attention it deserves. Actually, to investigate learners' application of social-affective strategy into English learning has great significance in cultivating learners' learning autonomy. This article explores the following two critical issues:Q1. Is social-affective strategy correlated with students' English writing level?Q2. Does social-affective strategy training promote students' learning autonomy?This study is carried out in the process of an experiment. The results are analyzed by quantitative and qualitative methods. There are 70 students from two parallel classes participating in the study of experiment which aims to answer these two research questions. In order to find out the feasibility of the experiment, a pre-test was carried out to check overall writing level as well as grammar performance of two groups. During the experiment, social-affective strategy is utilized for the experimental group meanwhile three typical learning strategies, which are memory strategy, cognitive strategy and compensation strategy, are employed to guide the control group to finish the writing task. At the end of the experiment, a post-test is used to study changes in writing level of two groups. Main findings of experiment include:1. A comparison between pre-test and post-test writing results shows that there is a relevant positive relation between social-affective strategy and student writing level. Compared with the control group, the average writing score of experimental group has improved. Unlike memory strategy, cognitive strategy and compensation strategy, social-affective strategy can't produce immediate and direct impact on students' writing performance. In the long run, social-affective strategy can help learners make progress in writing fundamentally.2. Compared with control class, some grammar error reductions can be found in the post-test writing of the experimental class without teacher's any special explanation of grammar points. That's to say with one year's social-affective strategy training, learners' initiative and autonomy in writing has been enhancedFinally, the paper puts forward some suggestions for effective the application of social-affective strategy. Besides, it is believed that long-term quantitative and qualitative research should be done to further understand how to apply social–affective strategy to second language writing.