The Effect Of Web Based Writing On English Majors’ Writing Self Efficacy

Self efficacy refers to individuals’ subjective recognition on their own ability to accomplish a task, which has an important influence on their behaviors. Based on Bandura’s self efficacy theory, learning self efficacy not only affects learners’ learning achievements directly, but could influence the achievements indirectly, such as, affecting their psychological process, regulation of motivations, self control and so on. Writing self efficacy is individuals’ personal recognition on their writing abilities, that is, learners’ own subjective identification on their abilities to fulfill writing tasks and make effective use of relative writing strategies.Hence, how to improve students’ English writing self efficacy has essential theoretical and practical meanings in English writing teaching field. For recent years, web based English learning has gained more and more attention, and increasing researchers have found that web based English writing is beneficial to improve learners’ English learning abilities. According to the value of web based teaching and self efficacy to English writing, this paper tries to investigate whether web base writing has an effect on improving English majors’ writing self efficacy, the reasons causing this effect and provide some effective strategies to enhance students’ writing self efficacy.Based on self efficacy theory, this study draws on the quantitative and qualitative research methods, chooses the 47 first-year English majors as the subjects which are divided into two classes, namely, experimental class and control class under two different environments, that is, traditional classroom and QQ platform. The main research questions are as follows: before the experiment, the status quo of English majors’ writing self efficacy in Yanshan University; the effect of web based writing on English majors’ writing self efficacy and the reasons causing this effect; the difference between the effects of web based writing on high level and low level students in the experimental class and the reasons causing this difference.Through questionnaires, writing tests and interview, the results of this study show that : the writing self efficacy of English majors in Yanshan University is not relatively high, and their writing task and skill self efficacy are both not high with most students feeling unconfident in writing; in addition, via web based writing, the overall writing self efficacy and writing task self efficacy of the experimental class are higher than those of the control class, but there is no significant difference in writing skill self efficacy of these two classes, although the writing skill self efficacy in the experimental class is a little bit higher than that of the control class; at last, after the experiment, in the experimental class, the high level students’ writing self efficacy is still higher than that of low level students, but the low achievers benefit more from the web based writing.Through the data analysis, the reasons about the improvement of students’ writing self efficacy are as follows: first, web based English writing is a new method to arouse their interests which are beneficial to improving their writing self efficacy; second, the teacher shows the good compositions on the QQ Zone and QQ groups, which is more convenient and effective for them to appreciate others’ compositions; third, the feedback online is timely, and with their modification the feedback tends to be better and better, so their writing self efficacy is higher and higher; last, online environment is more relaxed, which reduces their writing anxiety but improves their writing self efficacy.