| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 98 === The aim of this study was to explore 54 EFL college students’ use of strategies in the prewriting, writing, and self-editing stages. In addition, this study compared strategies used by proficient writers, moderately proficient writers, and less proficient writers in narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing tasks in order to investigate the effects of the three tasks on student’s writing, and to investigate students’ writing proficiency in relation to their strategy use. A writing proficiency test and a Background Information Survey were conducted in the beginning of the semester to examine students’ writing proficiency and to understand their writing difficulties and learning backgrounds. During the semester, students were required to turn in three writing tasks (i.e., narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing tasks) and fill out Writing Strategy Questionnaires. The Writing Questionnaires, containing writing strategy statements and perceptions of their individual writing process, were given to the students each time after they submitted an essay. To clarify the answers obtained from the questionnaires and to further understand their writing problems, all of the students were invited to participate in 30-minute, individual, student-teacher conferences. At the end of the semester, fifteen students were randomly selected to participate in one-hour, individual interviews to unearth in-depth insights into their strategy use across different writing tasks.
The findings show that the 54 students generally focused limited attention on generating ideas and organizing content in the prewriting stage, and they tended to pause frequently to think about and organize ideas during the writing of the three tasks. Students’ lack of prewriting preparation may explain their high-frequency strategy use including rereading the written texts during writing and monitoring global writing aspects at the self-editing stage. Moreover, this study found students relied heavily on bilingual dictionaries due to numerous concerns over their limited vocabulary knowledge. As for the effect of writing proficiency on students’ strategy, this study demonstrated that students with different writing proficiency did not vary significantly in their frequency of strategy use. Despite the fact that the students of different proficiency levels did not differ in the frequency of strategy use, the variety of writing strategies used revealed slight differences between proficient writers and less proficient writers in their attention to writing aspects across the three writing tasks.
With regard to task effect on writing processes, the findings indicated that the strategies of organizing ideas, pausing during the writing stage, and monitoring global writing aspects varied greatly for the three writing tasks. Students tended to organize their ideas more in the narrative task than in the descriptive task due to their awareness of the chronological aspect needed in narrative writing and to their strong focus on using a variety of words instead of a focus on the organization in the descriptive writing. As students perceived the argumentative task to be an easier and more familiar task, they organized their ideas less than in the narrative writing, and they paused less often in the argumentative writing than in the other two tasks. Due to a lower frequency of pauses in the argumentative tasks, students tended to monitor content, coherence, and organization after finishing their argumentative drafts. This differed from the descriptive task where students spent more time monitoring during the composing stages rather than during the self-editing stage or after finishing their drafts. These results indicated that although different tasks influenced students’ strategy use in different ways, the amount of attention students paid to global writing aspects did not vary as the task changed. Moreover, task familiarity seemed to be a greater factor than task complexity in what and how students’ used strategies, as evidenced by the argumentative task (viewed by students as less challenging than the descriptive task) which is more complex but more familiar to this study’s students.
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