Exploring the relationship of writing strategies in academic writing / Faizah Baharudin … [et al.]

Writing is one of the basic skills that is used and fostered in educating students. In order for students to reach the intended writing level, it needs rewriting again and again. Therefore, it is important for students to know and apply certain writing strategies that can help to ease the process to produce a good piece of writing. This quantitative study is conducted to determine the ESL learners’ perceptions on the use of five writing strategies namely; metacognitive, cognitive, social, affective and self regulation writing strategies in academic writing as well as to determine the relationship of all the writing strategies. A five-Likert scale survey questionnaire consists of six sections with 27 items distributed to 112 ESL learners at the Centre of the foundation Studies, Malaysia to determine their perceptions on writing strategies. Based on the findings of this study, the majority of the ESL learners employed metacognitive strategy when writing followed by cognitive, self regulation, affective and social. This study also revealed that there are strong relationships between all of the writing strategies. The findings will further assist both ESL educators and ESL learners on understanding writing strategies that can further improve learners’ performance in writing.