A Study of The Use of Strategies in ESL Academic Writing

Effective writing demonstrates a mastery of the subject matter and contributes to the advancement of knowledge as the process of writing itself requires learners to be able to employ appropriate strategies to produce quality work. Numerous past studies have underscored the importance of learning strategies, particularly writing strategies in facilitating learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in enhancing their proficiency in the language. However, as proclaimed by past studies, there are limited writing strategies studies on ESL undergraduate learners but more on generic learning strategies. Hence, this qualitative study was conducted to explore the writing strategies employed by ESL undergraduate learners when given a writing task and to investigate the relationship across all strategies used. The strategies focused in this study are metacognitive, effort regulation, cognitive, social and affective. A survey questionnaire rooted in Raoofi et al. (2017) consisted of six sections with 29 items distributed to 122 undergraduate students from a local public university. The findings revealed that metacognitive writing strategies are employed most by the participants and there is a high association between metacognitive and effort regulation strategies and between effort regulation and affective strategies. With these findings, this study offers insights that educators can use to enhance their pedagogical approaches to improve ESL learners' academic performance. It also highlights key factors in ESL academic writing strategies paving the way for future research to delve into adopting integrated approaches and consider other variables like the role of technology for a more comprehensive analysis.