A Study On English Writing Self-efficacy,Writing Strategy,Writing Performance And Their Correlations Of The First-year Non-english Majors

English writing has long been a challenging task for Chinese college students.It is both a cognitive and an affective activity.Large amount of literature indicates that Chinese college students have a low English writing proficiency and lack confidence in writing.Hence,learners' psychological factors have received increasing attention.Self-efficacy,proposed by Bandura in 1977,has attracted much attention of second language researchers.However,the research on the relationship between self-efficacy and other influencing factors of English performance has been insufficient.The present study focuses on EFL(English as a foreign language)writing and tries to explore the interrelationship between writing self-efficacy,writing strategy and writing performance.Research questions are as follows :(1)Are there any differences in writing performance in terms of different genders and majors?(2)Are there any differences in writing self-efficacy in terms of different genders,majors and high/low-performance students?(3)Are there any differences in using of writing strategies by different genders,majors and high/low-performance students?(4)What relations exist among writing self-efficacy,writing strategy and writing performance?Quantitative research method is mainly used in this study.The author uses two questionnaires,that is,EFL writing self-efficacy scale and EFL writing strategy scale,and a writing test to investigate 303 Chinese college students' English writing self-efficacy,the usage of writing strategy,and writing proficiency.Then the author analyzes the interrelationship among the three variables and concludes their influencing path.The results show that:(1)As a whole,students' writing performance is average and by contrast,content performance is much higher than language performance.Also,there exist significant gender differences in both language and content performance and female students are much better than the male students.Students of liberal arts are significantly better at language expression than the science students.However,there is no significant difference in the content expression in terms of major.(2)Students generally have a moderate degree of writing self-efficacy.There exist significant differences between the male and female,between students of liberal arts and science,between high and low-performance students in the three dimensions: writing task,writing skill and overall writing self-efficacy.(3)Students use cognitive strategies the most frequently,followed by meta-cognitive strategies,affective strategies and compensatory strategies.The female students use writing strategies more frequently.The students of liberal arts perform significantly better in the usage of meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies and affective strategies and there is no significant difference between liberal arts and science in the usage of writing compensatory strategies.High-performance students in general use more writing strategies than low-performance students.(4)The correlation analyses reveal that students' writing self-efficacy in the three dimensions is positively correlated with both language and content performance.In terms of writing strategies,meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies and affective strategies have a significant correlation with language performance and content performance respectively.Compensatory strategies are significantly correlated with language performance,while there is no significant relationship between compensatory strategies and students' content performance.More importantly,three dimensions of students' writing self-efficacy and four types of writing strategies are positively and significantly correlated.Further multiple regression analyses indicates that writing self-efficacy has a direct effect on both writing language and content performance,and especially,writing task self-efficacy contributes most to the prediction of writing performance.Writing strategies have no significant direct effects on writing performance,but it can affect writing performance by influencing writing self-efficacy as a mediator.Besides,cognitive strategies can affect writing performance to some extent.