A Review of EFL Students’ English Writing Self-efficacy

Abstract

Writing is the most difficult of all language skills (Zhang & Guo, 2012) and it involves a cognitive process (Bruning et al., 2013; Hayes, 2000). Self-efficacy refers to subjective beliefs in one’s abilities to perform a task (Bandura, 1997) and it belongs to cognition. Therefore, writing self-efficacy was studied widely on the ground that the two concepts share something in common: cognition. Writing self-efficacy refers to individuals’ judgments of how well they can accomplish a writing task based on their assessments of “various composition, grammar, usage, and mechanical skills” (Pajares & Valiante, 2001, p. 369). Previous studies demonstrated that writing self-efficacy was positively correlated with writing outcomes (Woottipong, 2020; Sun & Wang, 2020; Micheaux & White, 2019) Paramartha, 2016; Kirmizi, 2015; Pajares & Valiante, 1999). Hence, it is of great importance and necessity to research writing self-efficacy. The research purpose of this study is to compare the differences in English writing self-efficacy of different majors and explore potential factors of variations.