Research On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' English Writing Self-efficacy And Writing Achievements

Writing self-efficacy(WSE)is defined as writers' judgments of their abilities to successfully write compositions(Mitchell,2017).Researches in this field generally have English majors as subjects while relatively few researches are concerned about senior high school students' English writing self-efficacy.On the basis of Bandura's(1986)Social Cognitive Theory,this research aims to answer the following research questions:1)What is the general situation of English writing self-efficacy of senior high school students?2)What is the relation between English writing self-efficacy of senior high school students and gender/grade?3)What is the correlation between English writing self-efficacy of senior high school students and their English writing achievements?286 participants were chosen from 3 senior high schools in Jingjiang City,Jiangsu Province.A questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate their English writing self-efficacy.Writing scores of the final examination were employed to assess the students' writing proficiency.The collected data of the questionnaire survey was analyzed by means of SPSS 19.0.Three major findings were listed as follows:Firstly,the level of senior high school students' overall writing self-efficacy was medium.Students were more confident in accomplishing various general writing tasks than practical writing tasks.Students had medium level of writing skill self-efficacy.Secondly,significant differences between male and female students in writing self-efficacy existed.Male students had less confidence in accomplishing various writing tasks and performing various writing skills than female students.The differences among the three grades in writing self-efficacy were also significant,with senior grade one students the lowest and senior grade three the highest.Finally,senior high school students' writing achievements were significantly correlated with writing self-efficacy.Students with higher level of writing self-efficacy might have more confidence in performing various writing skills and accomplishing various writing tasks.Some pedagogical implications are put forward:Firstly,great importance should be attached to help students set attainable writing goals.Secondly,the process-genre approach is preferred in English writing classes.Finally,model examples should be provided for students to mimic.Some weaknesses existed in the research:the size of the sample was not large enough;the researcher only collected participants' writing scores of one English examination.Some recommendations are advanced for future researches:more efforts ought to be directed to expand the size of the sample;the participants' scores of the compositions of different genres and different topics should be considered to assess the students' writing proficiency.