A Review of English Learners’ Writing Self-efficacy

Abstract

English writing is a crucial skill for students to learn alongside listening, speaking, reading, writing, and viewing. It involves expressing information, ideas, thoughts, and emotions in written English form. Self-efficacy in English writing is an important factor that affects students’ writing achievement and strategy use. Many scholars have researched the factors that influence it. This paper reviews recent studies on self-efficacy in English writing from both home and abroad by referring to relevant literature. Firstly, it introduces the development trend of existing research through data. Then, it analyzes and summarizes the main contents of current research on writing self-efficacy in detail. Finally, it analyzes the shortcomings of the existing research and provides suggestions. The paper concludes that writing self-efficacy research mainly focuses on five aspects: investigating the level of writing self-efficacy, the relationship between self-efficacy and writing anxiety, writing strategies and academic performance, scale development, and the influence of wisdom teaching on writing efficacy. Despite this, there are still shortcomings in the research content, research methods, and research object diversity of writing self-efficacy, so the researchers provide suggestions for future efforts.