Abstract
This research can be described as an experimental quantitative one including: a strategy training; two homogenous experimental groups with different levels of proficiency; and two homogenous control groups. The subjects are 60 Spanish high school students, who have been selected after taking the Oxford Quick Placement-Test. The study aims at investigating the possible relationship between the effect of the strategy training and the subjects' level of proficiency. It is also designed to analyze the effect of the training on the use of communication strategies in the written medium. It is meant to study the effect of the strategy training on the subjects' writing skill in English. The results show that the students' level of proficiency exerts a strong effect on the subjects' use of written communication strategies (CSs) and on their strategy preference in written production. They also demonstrate how strategy training improves the subjects' written communication ability.
Highlights
The movement towards a new notion of teaching (Faerch & Kasper, 1980) includes the transmission of knowledge and the development of competencies
Since the experiment aims at enhancing the subjects’ writing skills in using English, we considered it trivial to deal with reduction strategies that cannot serve the aims of the actual study
In the One-Way ANOVA-test of the second written task shown in table 3 above, the two written communication strategies (CSs) introduced in the strategy training resulted significant in the post-test and the results of the written storytelling task are interpretable and represent a good source of analysis
Summary
The movement towards a new notion of teaching (Faerch & Kasper, 1980) includes the transmission of knowledge and the development of competencies. This study draws from the field of communication strategies (Dornyei & Scott, 1997; Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Poulisse, 1990; Tarone, 1989), since it is concerned with the investigation of the teachability of written communication strategies to enhance the students’ communicative competence. It offers a combination of questionnaires, tasks and observation in detecting and measuring CSs as a triangulation of data collection (Gao, 2007; Phakiti, 2003) to investigate the written communicative behavior it has proved to be difficult to observe on some moments and hard to explain on others
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