A Case Study Of Writing Conference In Senior High School And Its Influence On Self-efficacy

The new English Curriculum Standard clearly demands senior high schoolstudents that they should be able to write meaningful and cohesive essays. Indaily English teaching, teachers must lead students to build strong confidence andhelp them to form positive attitudes toward English learning. The complicacy ofEnglish writing makes teaching writing a major challenge in English teaching,and writing feedback directly influences the effect of teaching writing.The result of the questionnaire survey in the research shows that some waysof writing feedback are time-consuming and ineffective. As a result, the studentscould not get timely feedback and take no count of results of the feedbacks.However, a majority of the students regard writing conferences as a way whichbenefits them a lot. Therefore，the research aims at exploring the influence ofwriting conferences on student’s writing performance and writing self-efifcacy.Here writing self-efifcacy refers to students’ level of confidence in their writing.The assumptions of the research are writing conferences could improve students’writing performance and enhance their writing self-efifcacy.The author employs a case study as the research paradigm and analyzes indetail the cases of the subjects and testifies the assumptions of the research.Several research methods are adopted in the research, including literatureresearch method, questionnaire survey, interview and observation. Thequestionnaire survey investigates160student’s attitudes toward four kinds of feedback. And this paper focuses on analyzing their attitudes toward writingconferences. This provides the research with realistic basis. Writing self-efifcacyscale can be regarded as another questionnaire as well，and it is used to measurethe students’ writing self-efifcacy before and after the conferences. Throughliterature research method, the researcher gets the ways of conducting theconferences and the framework of the questionnaire. And the subjects ofinterview and observation are the six students for case study and their Englishteacher. The two methods are used to collect more information related to theresearch questions.The researcher draws conclusions that language accuracy and linguisticcomplexity of th’e students riting are both improved, and thus the students’wwriting performances are improved. In addition, the result of paired sample t-testshows that there is significant difference between the scores of pre-self-efficacytest and post-self-efficacy test. The data collected through interview andobservation provide subsidiary support for the conclusions.At last, the researcher summarizes the whole process of the research andanalyzes the benefits and pitfalls of writing conferences, and then offers a fewsolutions to overcome the problems. She states the implications for teachingwriting and puts forward her views on further studies.