The 5th Annual International Conference of the Asian Association for Language Assessment (AALA) (AALA 2018)

212 / 2018-04-11 13:40:53

The relationships between Taiwanese EFL learners' strategy use and writing test performance

EFL learners, English writing, learning strategies, GEPT

Plenary track > Standards in validating language assessments

Growing importance has been attached to the competence in English writing as English has gained the status of lingua franca in several professional domains. However, many EFL learners in Taiwan struggle to write a “well-organized and generally coherent essay that demonstrates sufficient control of vocabulary and sentence structures” as described in the GEPT High-Intermediate Writing Test Rating Scale. Previous studies have suggested an association between writing performance and the use of learning strategies (Kao & Reynolds, 2017; Yang & Plakans, 2012). Therefore, the aim of this project is to explore Taiwanese EFL learners’ use of strategies in learning English writing and its link with their performance in a high-stakes writing test with a larger subject pool than in previous studies. We have adopted both quantitative and qualitative approaches; however, only the quantitative analyses are reported in this paper. Data were collected from a pool of 500 EFL learners who took the GEPT High-Intermediate Writing Test (roughly equivalent to the CEFR B2 level). Their learning strategies were investigated by use of a writing strategy questionnaire based on Oxford’s (1990) taxonomy of learning strategies. Structural equation modeling was performed to explore the relationships between the EFL learners learning strategies and their writing performance. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the more proficient and the less proficient EFL writers in terms of their characteristic learning strategies. The findings of this study have implications for the teaching and learning of strategies that can enable EFL learners to write more effectively.