A Study Of The Relationship Between Self-efficacy And English Writing Proficiency Of The English Majors

As an important cognitive factor affecting individual’s differences, self-efficacy has long been the focus of researchers in the field of education and applied linguistics. During the process of language learning, writing plays a significant part. English writing is an important way of language output which is inevitably affected by writers’emotion. Self-efficacy, as an emotional factor, can have a great influence on writing proficiency. Linguistic and educational psychological researches in recent years have witnessed numerous researchers in the field of self-efficacy based on the theory of Bandura. However, most of the researches, especially those conducted domestically, are apt to theoretical literature reviews. There are seldom researches concerning the empirical study of the students’writing self-efficacy. What’s more, very few researches attach importance to the English majors in terms of the relationship of English proficiency and writing self-efficacy.Hence, this present study is carried out to investigate the status quo of junior English majors overall writing self-efficacy. In addition, it also explores the correlation between the writing proficiency and writing self-efficacy.The theoretical framework is mainly based on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory.As for the methodology, this research takes advantage of quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative research is mainly a writing self-efficacy questionnaire survey. The quantitative data analysis was performed both by the descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations analysis. The qualitative research is an interview of 10 subjects with the purpose of finding the real reason to explain the quantitative data.The subjects of the research are 138 junior students of English major from Tianjin University of Science and Technology,10 of them are selected according to their writing self-efficacy and writing proficiency for an interview.The research is conducted to find out the status quo of English major junior students’ writing self-efficacy and if there is any significant correlation between writing self-efficacy and writing proficiency.The final findings are as the following:1. Junior English majors’overall writing self-efficacy states on a medium level. Writing skill self-efficacy is the highest followed by writing influential factors and writing task self-efficacy. The reasons leading to the result are mainly the fact that the students lack the access to authentic written materials to read; they are obsessed with exam pressure; and specific instructions for English writing is insufficient.2. Correlation test in this study indicates that there is no relationship between writing self-efficacy and English writing proficiency. As to this finding, it is students’lack of enough practice, too limited varieties of the employment of writing strategies and weak motivation that lead to the result.As for the pedagogical implications, a sufficient supply of more specific writing instructions to individual students will be helpful to the elevation of their self-efficacy. Thus, English teachers should provide more guidance for different writing strategies and more chance for the students to practice. In addition, to inspire the students’integrative motivation can also be an effective way to improve the students’writing proficiency.