Abstract:
The sociocultural approach to writing strategy use emphasizes the importance of context and the mediating resources that learners can use to enhance the quality of their performance in writing (Lei, 2008). Accordingly, the present study explored the sociocultural strategy use of a convenient sample of 105 BA level students of English Language and Literature who had passed essay-writing courses in a state university in Iran by analyzing their responses to the items of a newly-developed sociocultural strategy use questionnaire consisting of different subscales, namely, artifact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated and role- mediated strategies. The results of the descriptive statistics revealed that the tool-mediated strategies, which are the subcategory of artifact-mediated strategies, had the highest frequency of use which is rather justified in the context of Iran. In addition, the students’ overall strategy use and their writing ability were correlated and a statistically significant relationship was found between these two variables. However, the results of the multiple regression analysis indicated that none of the subscales had a unique predicting power in accounting for the learners’ writing ability. The researchers also compared the sociocultural strategy use of more- and less-skilled student writers and found a significant difference in the strategy use of different individuals.
Machine summary:
student of TEFL, Hakim Sabzevari University Faculty of Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature, Sabzevar, Iran The sociocultural approach to writing strategy use emphasizes the importance of context and the mediating resources that learners can use to enhance the quality of their performance in writing (Lei, 2008).
Accordingly, the present study explored the sociocultural strategy use of a convenient sample of 105 BA level students of English Language and Literature who had passed essay-writing courses in a state university in Iran by analyzing their responses to the items of a newly-developed sociocultural strategy use questionnaire consisting of different subscales, namely, artifact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated and role- mediated strategies.
Due to the importance of context in L2 writing research (Casanave, 2002; Leki, 1995; Sasaki, 2004, 2007; Villamil & de Guerrero, 1996; Wong, 2005) and the new paradigm shift from cognitive to sociocultural approaches to SLA and writing studies (Casanave, 1995, Lei, 2008), more attention is directed towards re-conceptualizing writing strategy research from a sociocultural perspective in which writing is not merely approached as an individually constructed product isolated from its context, but "offers a perspective within which writing can be examined as a social practice, with students as active participants in constructing learning processes, and as a result, the interaction between different factors can be explored" (Rahimi & Noroozisiam, 2013, p.
The shift in focus of instruction and research from evaluating the final product of L2 writing to an emphasis on identifying the actions and behaviors that learners engage in while producing written texts also justifies conducting studies to explore the mediation strategies students writers use to come up with a refined text.