The Relationship Between Writing Strategies and Writing Performance in Story Continuation Writing Tasks

Abstract

This study examined the components of writing strategies employed in the story continuation writing task (SCWT) and investigated how these strategies related to different aspects of writing performance. Specifically, it adopted factor analyses to validate the strategy subscale of Ye et al.’s (2021) writing performance questionnaire and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the relationship between strategy use and writing performance, as measured by the holistic writing scores and 11 textual indices. The data comprised 330 questionnaire responses and 330 SCWT essays produced by the same group of high school English as a Foreign Language learners selected through convenience sampling. Factor analyses identified three task-specific strategy components: reading_to_select , reading_to_organize , and content_developing . These components represent learners’ alignment with the reading passage at the linguistic, discoursal, and situational levels and correspond to the processes of imitation, extension, and creation as conceptualized in the xu -argument. SEM results indicated that content_developing was the only strategy that exerted a significant positive effect on writing scores and enhanced semantic alignment. These findings suggest that the SCWT entails the skill of alignment, particularly with respect to learners’ ability to creatively extend the storyline presented in the reading passage. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.