A Study Of High School Students’ Writing Strategies In Continuation Writing Tasks

English writing is a crucial and also a challenging and demanding language skill for high school students to master.Students’ appropriate choice and use of writing strategies can improve their English writing performance.The Continuation Writing Task(CWT)is a newly developed kind of integrated writing task that is studied to be able to stimulate language learning and promote language competence in an efficient and effective way,which has appeared in the National College Entrance Examination in Zhejiang and Shandong Province since 2016,thus drawing much attention of English teachers and researchers.Although the effects of CWT in encouraging language learning have been studied,little is known with respect to the relationship between the senior high school students’ CWT writing strategy use and their writing performance.Based on some relevant writing strategy questionnaires and with some modifications and adjustments appropriate for senior high school students,the present study adopts The Questionnaire of CWT Writing Strategies to investigate the high school students’ use of CWT writing strategies.In this study,114 Grade 12 students from two classes in Jinan are selected as the participants.Quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted,including a questionnaire,a test and a semi-structured interview as the instruments,to explore the correlation between the high school students’ use of writing strategies and their writing performance in CWT.This study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the situation of the senior high school students’ use of CWT writing strategies?(2)What is the correlation between the senior high school students’ use of CWT writing strategies and their writing performance?(3)What is the difference in the use of CWT writing strategies between high achievers and low achievers in writing?It is found out that,first of all,the frequencies of the different types of writing strategies the Grade 12 students adopted in CWT is uneven,and the general application of writing strategies falls into an intermediate level.The most frequently used strategy is the linguistic strategy.Social/affective strategy is the strategy that students use least.Second,there are significant correlations between the different strategies and writing performance.Linguistic strategy and resource management strategy are highly positively correlated with writing performance.Among the six categories of CWT writing strategies,13 sub-strategies are positively correlated with writing performance.Finally,the high achievers in writing apply writing strategies more frequently than low achievers.Significant differences are found in the use of linguistic strategy and social/affective strategy between the two groups.Based on the findings in the present study,the author puts forward some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research.