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

English writing ability is an important aspect of students' English language skills(listening,speaking,reading and writing).It is an effective combination of cognitive and emotional activities,that is,writing is not only a kind of understanding of one's own ability,it is also an activity to express one's feelings.In writing,individual affective factors may have an impact on students,and will also have a certain degree of influence on their self-efficacy.According to Bandura's theory of self-efficacy(1986,1997),writing self-efficacy is the writer's confidence in his or her ability to accomplish a specific writing task.Foreign studies have found that learners' attitudes and ideas play a key role in writing(Faigley et al.,1985).The study of writing self-efficacy will provide a promising approach to the reform of composition teaching(Beach 1989).Writing self-efficacy also has a significant predictive effect on students' composition achievements.And self-efficacy also affects learners' choice,effort,persistence,patience and anxiety in the process of completing their writing tasks.Research has shown that having confidence in your writing skills can help learners better complete their writing tasks,because it helps learners to become more interested in writing,to work tirelessly,to be more resilient in the face of difficulties,and to experience less anxiety(Pajares et al.1997).However,in many studies on the teaching of English writing,researchers mainly focus on the writing knowledge and skills and ignore the exploration of psychological factors that affect students' writing ability.At the same time,there are relatively few researches on self-efficacy combined with specific subjects in our country.And the specific research on self-efficacy in English writing mainly focuses on the college students and English majors.At present,the research on English writing self-efficacy of high school students in China is not very comprehensive.Therefore,this study takes high school students' self-efficacy in English writing as the starting point,and adopts a combination method of both quantitative and qualitative approaches(i.e.questionnaire and interview).A total of 206 students were selected from the first High School of Wuchuan County,Hohhot.First of all,a questionnaire survey was conducted on their self-efficacy in English writing,in which the average writing scores of the second monthly examination and the mid-term examination were used to test the students' English writing achievements.The data collected by the questionnaire survey were analyzed by SPSS22.0.At the same time,the paper also conducts face-to-face interviews with four senior high school students and four English teachers in order to explore the deep-seated factors that affect students' English writing ability and achievements.This study aims to have a detailed understanding of the following questions:1)What is the general situation of English writing self-efficacy among senior high school students?2)What are the correlation between senior high school students' English writing self-efficacy and their English writing achievements?3)What are the correlations between English writing skill self-efficacy,English writing task self-efficacy and English writing achievements respectively among senior high school students?The main conclusions of this study are as follows:First of all,the overall writing self-efficacy of senior high school students is at an intermediate level.Both the students' writing task self-efficacy and students' writing skill self-efficacy are at the moderate level,and the overall level of writing skill self-efficacy is slightly higher than that of writing task self-efficacy.At the same time,significant differences are testified in writing self-efficacy between male and female students.Boys are less confident than girls about accomplishing all kinds of writing tasks and using various writing skills.Secondly,there is a significant correlation between senior high school students' writing achievements and writing self-efficacy.The higher writing self-efficacy the students possess,the higher their writing achievements are.On the contrary,if students' writing self-efficacy is lower,the students' writing performance is relatively poor.Finally,the two dimensions of writing self-efficacy(writing taskself-efficacy and writing skill self-efficacy)are positively correlated with students' English writing achievements.The higher the students' self-efficacy in writing is,the more confident they are in using writing skills and completing writing tasks,and the higher writing scores they get.The teaching implications of this study are as follows: teachers should help students set reasonable writing goals;Teachers should guide students to carry out positive and reasonable attribution and strengthen the training of students' writing strategies in English writing class;At the same time,teachers should optimize the feedback system of writing and make a comprehensive evaluation of students' writing.There are some shortcomings in this study: the sample size is not large enough;the researchers used the average of writing scores of the second monthly examination and the English midterm examination to measure the students' writing achievements,which is not comprehensive enough.Therefore,the following research should expand the sample size of the experiment,and use the composition scores of which contains different genres and topics to test the students' English writing proficiency.