Relationship between socio-cultural writing strategy use and language proficiency among Chinese tertiary English majors

Abstract

This paper aims to report on the results of a study on the use of socio-cultural writing strategies as well as its correlation with second language proficiency of a group of Chinese tertiary English majors. To this end, 306 English major students were randomly invited for participating in a questionnaire survey, and 12 of them were purposively sampled for a semi-structured interview. The collected quantitative data were subjected to descriptive analysis as well as Pearson Correlation test. The quantitative results show that the respondents orchestrated a wide range of utilizing socio-cultural writing strategies, of which they had a high level of using role-mediated strategies, followed by a medium-to-high level in deploying sign-mediated strategies, rule-mediated strategies, tool-mediated strategies, and community-mediated strategies respectively. Pearson Correlation test reveals a significantly negative correlation between a dimension of community-mediated strategies (peer interaction) and the surveyed population’s NMET (National Matriculation English Test) scores, and a significantly positive correlation between a dimensional (task requirement) and overall rule-mediated strategies and the participant’s TEM-4 (Test for English Major Band 4) results. These results were further reflected in the qualitative data. The findings of this study shall shed light on teaching English writing to English majors in the Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) context and others.