The Impact Of Metacognitive Strategies On Non-English Majors' English Writing Self-Efficacy

Nowadays, in the field of second language acquisition, language learning strategies are actions, steps and methods which they take in language learning in order to improve their second language learning abilities. Metacognitive strategies are a kind of learning strategies and have been researched to be a superior technical ability in language learning, which play a vital role in learning process.According to Bandura (1986), "Self-efficacy is the belief in individual's abilities to implement or learn behaviors at specified levels. It has closely relation to individual's own personal capabilities to implement a series of tasks or a specific task in a specific field. It can be referred as people's judgment of their abilities to produce specified levels of their performance." Writing self-efficacy is individuals'judgment of their competence in writing, specially their judgment of their ability to write different writing tasks and of their possession of varying composition, usage, and mechanical skill.As a cognitive method, self-efficacy does affect learning strategies in some way. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the relationship between metacognitive strategies and English writing self-efficacy.The subjects of this thesis are the freshmen of non-English majors from Shen Yang Normal University. The instruments include two questionnaires, interviews and writing tasks of pre-test and post-test. All the freshmen take the entrance English examination, and two natural classes which have no obvious differences in their scores are chosen as the control class and the experimental class. During the experiment, students from the experimental class accept 15-week metacognitive strategy training, while students from the control class are provided with regular teaching without any strategy training. Role of teacher in this experiment is leading, conducting strategy training and monitoring. According to the results and analysis of the collected data, the following conclusion can be drawn:(1) the overall tendency of metacognitive strategy use and writing self-efficacy of the both classes are at a low level. After 15-week teaching, metacognitive strategy use and writing self-efficacy of the two classes have been enhanced. It is noticeable that the degree of improvement of experimental class who accept metacognitive strategies is much greater than that of control class, which proves that metacognitive strategies do affect students'writing self-efficacy. (2) The writing achievements of both classes have improved. However, the degree of experimental class is much greater than that of control class, which shows that writing self-efficacy do have an effect on students' writing achievement. (3) Most of the students agree with the positive effect of metacognitive strategy training and think metacognitive strategy training can improve their writing self-efficacy and writing achievement.