How EFL Students Strategically Facilitate Their Writing Processes: A Sociocultural Approach

Abstract

This study explored how EFL students strategically mediated their writing with a multitude of resources in writing activities. The participants were 49 Korean-speaking EFL students. These students all took a course, entitled “Teaching EFL Writing,” an in-service teacher training course, offered at the Graduate School of Education in a large university in Seoul, Korea. Once the writing was completed, they filled out the questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of open-ended questions to ask about the writing process, including use of writing strategies. Four types of writing strategies were identified: artifact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated, and role-mediated strategies. Subcategories were specified within each category to further explain the students’ strategy use. The most frequently used strategy was artifact-mediated strategy with 157 occurrences in total, whereas the least frequently used strategy was community-mediated strategy with 34 occurrences in total. Strategy use actually involves the strategic mediation of various resources. These resources, ranging from artifacts to people, from rules to roles, belong to the sociocultural context and thus strategy use is always socioculturally situated and distributed. While mediating resources facilitated students’ writing processes, their use caused tensions and contradictions within an individual’s activity system as well.