Composing strategies employed by high-and low-performing Iranian EFL students in essay writing classes

The need to investigate writing strategy use in different socio-cultural contexts has been suggested as one of the primary themes in L2 writing research. To this end, drawing upon Mu's (2005) taxonomy of ESL/EFL writing strategies, the present study explored the employment of writing strategies by 58 high-and low-performing Iranian EFL writers in their essay writing classes. The findings obtained through concurrent think-aloud procedure indicated that high-performing learners were more strategic than their low-performing counterparts and that they employed cognitive strategies, rhetorical strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, communicative strategies, and socio-affective strategies, respectively. The low-performing EFL writers employed cognitive strategies, communicative strategies, rhetorical strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, and socio-affective strategies, respectively. The results of the study suggest that it is the proper employment of the writing strategies that mainly distinguishes between successful and less successful writers. The findings also imply that awareness and employment of the metacognitive strategies seem to be a significant predictor of English writing ability, and that most of the low-performing EFL writers are ignorant about the significance of metacognitive strategies. It seems that raising L2 learners' awareness of language learning strategies in general, and L2 writing strategies especially metacognitive strategies in particular can be beneficial for L2 learners' writing.