Improvement of Preservice Turkish Teachers’ Perceived Writing Self-Efficacy Beliefs

Abstract

The concept of self-efficacy is built upon the theory of Social Cognitive Learning by Bandura. Based on this theory, one could posit that an individual’s belief on his/her self-efficacy at any given subject is of high importance. A body of research shows that people with high self-efficacy levels have higher performance levels. In parallel to this, writing self-efficacy perception describes the belief one has in his/her writing skills. In this scope, this study aimed to determine the improvement of self-efficacy perceptions of preservice Turkish teachers on their writing skills during undergraduate education. The study group consisted of 94 preservice teachers. For the research, conducted based on the mixed methods research, quantitative data were collected both at the beginning and end of the undergraduate program, followed by collection of qualitative data through open-ended questions posed to 39 participants. The results of the analyses revealed that the perception of preservice Turkish teachers on their writing self-efficacy improved throughout the education they had received, that they showed progress in items of prewriting and draft; and that however there was no significant difference in revising and editing, i.e. one of the most important processes in writing. The responses provided by the participants to the open-ended questions also proved this argument to be true. Seeing that the participants did not make any considerable progress in revising and editing process at the end of the undergraduate education is an important indication that there exist challenges in both language learning and teaching and that preservice teachers cannot develop an adequate level of awareness on this process.