Investigating the English Writing Strategies Used by Chinese Senior High School Students

Abstract

The present study mainly reports the writing strategies which employed by Chinese senior high school students. It aims at: 1) finding out what writing strategies the student writers used and how frequently the student writers use these strategies in their writing; 2) whether the employment of writing strategies varies with gender difference; 3) what relationship between writing strategy employment and writing proficiency is; and 4) to what extent the first language exerts an influence onto the second language writing. The empirical investigation, by taking use of a questionnaire and a writing test, was carried out among 98 subjects chosen from Grade two at the Attached Middle School of Henan Normal University. Several major findings have been found. Apparently, the student writers used different types of writing strategies with a high frequency; the patterns of writing strategy employment between groups of male and female student writers were different. A significant difference had been found between the male and female students: when compared with male student writers, female employed higher English writing proficiency, had stronger motivations and clearer attributions of their unsatisfactory writing performance, and performed writing strategies much better. Frequency of writing strategy use varied with different writing proficiencies. Both high-level students and intermediate-levels employed more writing strategies than the low-level ones, while there was no significant difference in their frequency of employing writing strategies between high-level students and the intermediate ones.