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(2) What are the differences between the effects of comparative continuation on senior high school students’ English writing task self-efficacy and English writing skill self-efficacy?

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Core Concepts

2.1.1 Writing self-efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to people’s judgment about personal abilities (Bandura, 1986). Later, on the basis of Bandura’s research, many scholars conducted a more profound and more comprehensive study on self-efficacy and believed that self-efficacy is indeed universal and acts in different fields. Hence, self-efficacy in different areas has the same structural characteristics as the “self-efficacy” mentioned by Bandura. This includes writing self-efficacy. According to Bandura’s (1986, 1997) self-efficacy theory, writing self-efficacy is a writer’s confidence in his or her ability to accomplish a specific writing task. There are three views on the structure of writing self-efficacy. One perspective defines that writing self-efficacy is students’ confidence evaluation of the effective use of writing skills (McCarthy, Meier & Rinderer, 1985), while the other perspective defines it as students’ judgment of ability to successfully complete specific writing tasks (Graham & Harris, 1989). An additional perspective, which combines the previous two perspectives, proposes that writing self-efficacy comprises two distinct components: self-efficacy judgment of successful use of specific writing skills and self-efficacy judgment of successful completion of specific writing tasks (Shell, Murphy & Bruning, 1989), namely, writing task self-efficacy and writing skill self-efficacy. Specifically, writing task self-efficacy refers to the writer’s belief that he or she can successfully complete a certain writing task, such as writing an email or writing a response to a specific situation.

2.2 Previous Studies on Writing Self-efficacy

The literature on writing self-efficacy mainly focuses on five aspects: current situation of students’ writing self-efficacy, the research of scales, the correlation between writing self-efficacy and writing anxiety, writing performance, and improvement.

2.2.1 Current situation of students’ writing self-efficacy

Tang and Xu (2011), Li and Liu (2013) have similar research results: the average self-efficacy of first-year non-English major students in English writing is lower than 3.5 points (5 points) or 70 points (100 points), and they are generally at a medium or low level. However, according to Pan (2015), the overall level of self-efficacy in English writing was 52.83 points (full score: 90) in the study of four non-English majors in a university, failing or at a low level. Gu and Li (2018) studied the English writing self-efficacy of junior middle school students and concluded that the overall English writing self-efficacy, English writing skill self-efficacy and English writing task self-efficacy of junior middle school students were respectively 2.94, 2.81, and 3.08 (on a 5-point scale), which were at a low level. Ji (2019) and Zheng (2020) also came to a similar conclusion in their research on senior high school students’ English writing self-efficacy: the level of 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。