The Impact of Genre-based Instruction on Academic Writing Selfefficacy: The Case of Graduate Students’ Thesis Proposal

This study was conducted to explore the effects of genre-based writing instruction on thesis proposal writing self-efficacy and writing quality. Twenty-two graduate students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language participated in the study. Drawing on Bandura s (2006) guidelines, we developed a proposal writing self-efficacy questionnaire, which students completed at the beginning of the semester and the end of one semester. They wrote a preliminary proposal at the beginning of the semester, that is, before being exposed to a genre-based approach. For one semester the students’ awareness was raised concerning the generic structures of the sections included in the thesis proposal and relevant lexico-grammatical features were highlighted. Students initially showed strong writing self-efficacy, which significantly increased at the end of the semester. They also showed remarkably significant improvement in their proposal writing skills. Students’ pre-instruction skills perception was higher than their proposal quality, which may be attributed to their lack of knowledge of academic writing conventions. However, after receiving genrebased instruction, their proposal quality surpassed their level of self-efficacy. The results of this study are discussed, and implications of the study are provided.