A Contrast Between Uyghur And Han Senior High School Students In Using English Writing Strategies

Writing strategies as a kind of learning strategies can not only help students improve their writing skills,but also help students improve their written communicative competence.Therefore,this research aims to know the current status of English writing strategies used by Uyghur senior high school students and Han senior high school students and provide some suggestions for improving the teaching of English writing in senior high school and help senior high school students to improve their writing skills through using writing strategies properly.This research was based on the communication strategies theory and adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,and took 100 Uyghur senior high school students and 100 Han senior high school students from senior high school in Yining as the research subjects.A research of writing strategies used by them in English writing was conducted to understand the frequency of use and significant differences in using writing strategies.The questionnaire data was analyzed by SPSS18.0.Then,in order to have a further understanding of the research questions,3 Uyghur senior high school students and 3 Han senior high school students were interviewed in this research.The research questions were as follows:1)How frequently do Uyghur and Han senior high school students use writing strategies in their English writing?2)Are there significant differences in writing strategies used by Uyghur and Han senior high school students in their English writing?The results of the questionnaire were as follows:(1)The frequency of writing strategies used by Uyghur and Han senior high school students were different: the lexical avoidance,syntax avoidance and topic avoidance were usually used by Uyghur and Han senior high school students approximation and circumlocution were sometimes used;the word coinage,language switch and message abandonment were generally not used.To sum up,both Uyghur and Han senior high school students were at the medium level in using writing strategies(M =2.82,M=2.92).(2)There were significant differences in appeal for assistance and literal translation used by Uyghur and Han senior high schoolstudents in English writing.The frequency of appeal for assistance used by Uyghur senior high school students was higher than Han senior high school students(M=3.54>M=3.31).The frequency of literal translation used by Han senior high school students was higher than Uyghur senior high school students(M=3.38>M=2.43).The result of interview also further confirmed the results of questionnaire.