An Empirical Study Of Length Approach’ Effect On English Writing Self-efficacy Of Senior High School Students

This thesis aims to explore whether Length Approach affects English writing self-efficacyof senior high school students to provide suggestions for teaching of English writing in seniorhigh school. Self-efficacy refers to the subjective judgment of one’s success to a certain behaviorand has important direct effects on individual behavior. According to Bandura’ theory ofself-efficacy, academic self-efficacy has indirect effects on scholastic achievement byinfluencing other psychological process which is closely related to academic achievement.Therefore, training English writing self-efficacy of senior high school students is significant inEnglish writing teaching.However, the writing self-efficacy of senior high school students don’t cause sufficientattention in English writing class. In fact, writing teaching has always been a very weak link inthe entire English teaching. Many senior high school students don’t know how to write and donot wish to write because they lack writing ability and writing interest. Some students evendislike of writing. Many experts and scholars conducted some researches from different angles toimprove their writing ability and writing attitudes. However, there are few scholars studying howto training their writing self-efficacy, in order to achieve these ends.In order to change the English teaching situation where affective factors and motivation ofstudents aren’t given significant emphasis in English writing class, Professor Wang Chumingproposed Length Approach, which is a new writing pedagogy based on second languageacquisition theories. Its basic idea is that teachers lead learners to write increasing longcompositions through adjusting the length requirement of writing gradually. Thus, the output ofthe target language will increase, which will enhance their sense of achievement, stimulatefurther learning, improve their confidence in their capacity to learn the foreign language, andeventually accelerate the transformation of knowledge of foreign languages into ability for use.Since Length Approach was brought in, many scholars have conducted studies and demonstratedthe positive effect of this method in English teaching, such as it promoting writing ability ofCollege Students and it easing the anxiety of students in English writing etc. But there are fewstudies which prove whether it has an impact on improving writing self-efficacy. This study attempts to make some suggestion for English writing teaching in senior highschool. There are two questions which the study aims to explore:(1) Can Length Approach moreeffectively affect the writing self-efficacy of senior high school students than traditional writingteaching mode does?(2) Are there any differences between Length Approach affecting writingself-efficacy of high achievers and low achievers? Therefore, taking emotion theory and othertheories as the theoretical basis, the author carried out an experimental research of16weeks inShouguang No.1Middle School in the first half of2014.110students from two parallel classeswere selected as the participants of the study. One class was randomly selected as theexperimental class and was taught by Length Approach. Another class was regarded as thecontrol class and was taught by the traditional teaching writing method. According to students’level of self-efficacy obtained from the pre-test, the students of the experimental class aredivided into the low achievers and high achievers. Research instruments in this teachingexperiment included English Writing Self-efficacy Questionnaire and interviews. The authorused quantitative research methods and inputted collected experimental data into SPSS17.0.Through the comparative analysis of the writing efficacy questionnaires before and after theexperiment, the author got the experimental results combined with qualitative analysis ofinterviews.The research results show that compared with traditional writing teaching mode, LengthApproach can more effectively affect writing self-efficacy of senior high school students. Inaddition, it is found that the low achievers made more obvious progress of writing self-efficacythan the high achievers. The results confirm that Length Approach can effectively enhancestudents writing self-efficacy by providing encouraging marking and exposing more input.Especially for the students of low self-efficacy, Length Approach gives them the confidence andmotivation of language use. Therefore, teachers should realize the importance of self-efficacyand effectively use Length Approach in the English writing teaching to help students makegreater progress. However, due to some objective factors and subjective factors such as the shortexperimental time, the existence of uncontrollable variables and the capacity of author, there aresome inevitable limitations in this research.