Enhancing factors for doctoral students’ writing self-efficacy: A narrative approach

Abstract

Self-efficacy is an important construct doctoral students need to work on in their academic writing. Elevating academic writing self-efficacy to achieve the international standards for EFL doctoral students is a pursuit of success. Previous studies seem to focus on anxiety commonly experienced by the students rather than on EFL their positive self-concept and high persistence, parts of self-efficacy. Thus, this study aims to investigate factors enhancing the academic writing self-efficacy of doctoral students studying overseas (e.g., Australia, Germany, Korea, Thailand, and the U.K). For this narrative study, a set of narrative frames and interview guides were used to collect data from eight volunteer participants who were purposively selected on these criteria:  coming from the Eastern part of Indonesia, under competitive scholarship awards, having at least 10-year EFL teaching background. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the collected data. The findings indicate that the contributing factors include good self-concept, self-belief in academic writing, doctoral study (supervisory atmosphere, the supportive school system, and scholar community), self-efficacy in writing (logic, argumentation, near-native style, integrating references). Through this study, the narrative frames proved to be practicals tool for exploring the elusive construct of self-efficacy in EFL writing. The study suggests training on writing self-efficacy for graduate schools in EFL contexts along with establishing a support system, and this aims at achieving international academic writing standards for the prospects of publication.