A Study Of The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' English Writing Proficiency And Their Use Of Self-regulated Learning Strategies

Writing is an important part of middle school English teaching and one of the four basic skills(listening,speaking,reading and writing)of students' English learning.It is also one of the main means to improve students' English thinking ability and cultivate students' comprehensive English proficiency.Most of the existing research on English writing for middle school students focuses on the writing theory,writing process,writing text,writing factors,writing teaching and writing strategies.Yet few studies are on the relationship between the use of self-regulated learning strategies and students' English writing proficiency.The study is mainly to explore the correlation between the students' English writing proficiency and their use of self-regulated learning strategies,and the influence of students' use of the four sub-strategies on their English writing proficiency as well by answering the following two research questions:1)How is the students' English writing proficiency correlated to their use of self-regulated learning strategies?2)How does the use of the four sub-strategies of self-regulated learning strategies influence the students' English writing proficiency?The research subjects are 104 students from two classes in the second year of high school in Kunming Experimental Middle School.In the study,the questionnaire survey and interview are conducted to investigate the use of self-regulated learning strategies.Besides,the author collects the English composition scores of each student from three tests.By carefully analyzing both qualitatively and quantitatively the data collected,conclusions are reached as follows.1)There is a significantly positive correlation between the students' English writing proficiency and their use of self-regulated learning strategies(F(40,63)=3.672,p=0.00<0.05),that means the students with higher English writing scores applied more self-regulating learning strategies in their writing.In addition,adj R2 is 0.509,indicating that the independent variable,the use of self-regulated learning strategies,can account for 50.9 percent's change of students' English writing scores.It has statistical significance.2)Among the four sub-strategies of self-regulated learning strategies,cognitive strategies,social behavioral strategies and motivational regulated strategies are significantly correlated to the participants' English writing proficiency.Cognitive strategies have the highest explanatory power for the students' English writing proficiency,reaching 51%,and it indicates that the use of cognitive strategies can promote the improvement of the students' English writing proficiency;then motivational regulated strategies gain the second highest explanatory power for the students' English writing proficiency,which is 33.6%,and the explanatory power of social behavioral strategies for the students' English writing proficiency is 30.5%,which proves that the use of these two strategies has a positive impact on the improvement of the students' English writing proficiency.The individual explanatory power of each item of these three sub-strategies gives a more detailed description of their impact on the students' English writing proficiency.However,the correlation between metacognitive strategies and the high school students' English writing proficiency is not significant in this research(F(9,94)=1.228,p=0.287>0.05).