A Study On The Relationship Between English Writing Self-efficacy And Writing Performance Of Senior High School Students

It is recognized that English writing ability,as an important aspect of students' English language skills,is a crucial indicator judging whether they have a good command of the language.However,a lager number of researches have proven that English writing,as an intergrated and complicated cognitive and emotional activity,is one of the most challenging tasks,and that students have insufficient confidence when engaged in writing.Therefore,much attention has been attached to investgating affective factors that may have an effect on their writing proficiency,among which,self-efficacy plays a vital role.The concept of self-efficacy is proposed by Bandura which refers to individual's belief in his capability of accomplishing a task.As for writing self-efficacy,it concerns individual's evaluation of self-writing ability,especially the belief in the proper use of specific writing skills and the ability to complete specific writing tasks.According to Bandura,learners with higher self-efficacy perform better in writing regardless of their actual writing proficiency.Based on the Social Cognitive Theory,this paper makes a study with quantitative and qualitative method to research the following questions:(1)What is the current state of students' writing self-efficacy in senior high school?(2)Is senior high school students' writing self-efficacy significantly related with their writing performance?(3)Is there a significant difference in writing performance among students of different writing self-efficacy level? 100 students from Ji'an No.3 middle school are invited in the experiment.The adopted questionnaire is composed of two dimensions,writing task self-efficacy and writing skill self-efficacy.The data analysis reveals that the questionnaire has good reliability and validity.In addition,in this research,students' writing performance is measured in terms of accuracy,fluency and syntactic complexity through the percentage of total error-free T-units,the ratio of words per T-unit and clauses per T-unit.As is indicated from the study,first,senior high school students show moderate belief in their English writing and their writing skill self-efficacy is much higher than writing task self-efficacy.Second,there exists a positive and significant relationship between students' writing self-efficacy and their writing accuracy(R=.753),fluency(R=.759)and syntactic complexity(R=.662).Third,in terms of accuracy,a significant difference between high-level and low-level writing self-efficacy group as well as between moderate-level and low-level writing self-efficacy group can be seen.With regard to fluency,the difference between students of high-level and low-level writing self-efficacy group is dramatically different.As for syntactic complexity,the difference among three groups of different writing self-efficacy doesn't reach a significant level.Based on the results presented above,a conclusion can be drawn that students' writing self-efficacy is significantly and positively related with their writing performance.As a result,it is high time for teachers to enhance students' writing self-efficacy and further improve students' writing performance by the following ways.First of all,it is advisable for teachers to provide effective feedback for students' writing in time.In the second place,teachers are supposed to expose students to more successful experience in English writing.Last but not the least,more attention ought to be paid to instructing students to make positive and reasonable attribution.