A Survey Of Strategies To Improve Senior Students’English Writing Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to one’s subjective judgements on his own ability to successfully carry out a certain act, which has a significantly direct impact on individual behavior. According to the self-efficacy theory proposed by Bandura, self-efficacy is not only a direct impact on students’academic achievement, but it also can affect it directly through other closely related psychological processes and the regulation and control of motives in learning of English writing. Therefore, How to motivate students’interest in learning and to stimulate enthusiasm for learning to enhance students’confidence in English writing has important theoretical and practical significance of the issue.Considering the important role that Self-efficacy plays in Senior Englsih writing, this paper aims to find out not only the relationship between senior high school students’ self-efficacy and their writing ability, but also effective strategies to enhance them. The effectiveness was also verified after the strategies were conducted.The research was designed into three parts:the first part (Pre-test) was to investigate the situation of students’English writing learning and to analyze the correlation between self-efficacy and the writing ability of students. The second part (Intervention) was the experiment of self-efficacy training. The third part (Post-test) analyzed the statistic before and after the experiment, which verified the assumptions:the self-efficacy in learning of English writing can be improved through training; training can improve their writing academic performance. This study used survey and experimental research methods.The conclusions of this study can be drawn:(1) The research shows a positive correlation between self-efficacy and English writing achievements. Students’English writing achievements are neutral. There is an obvious difference between high-achieving students and low-achieving students: low-achieving students have low senses of self-efficacy; high-achieving students have high senses of self-efficacy. The moderators which have a greater influence on self-efficacy are:affective physiological state, teacher’s feedback, previous experience and writing attribution.(2) Students’English writing self-efficacy can be improved through training. Meanwhile, it is found that self-efficacy of students in control class can be improved with the improvement of writing ability even without training. However, having accepted the training, the experimental class has a much more obvious improvement in English writing self-efficacy than the control class. Moreover, there is an obviously different effectiveness after the training between high-achieving students and low-achieving students:low-achieving students got a much greater improvement than the high-achieving students. (3) After the training, the experimental class made remarkable progress in writing ability, while the control class got certain improvement with a normal teaching procedure. But obviously, students’ self-efficacy training made a more significant contribution to improving their writing ability. The training had different impact on high-achieving students and low-achieving students:low-achieving students got an effective improvement, while the high-achieving students didn’t.