Exploring first-year Chinese doctoral students’ metacognitive awareness and self-efficacy in an L2 genre-based academic writing course

This qualitative case study (N = 11) explores first-year Chinese doctoral students' metacognitive awareness of task perception and self-efficacy in academic writing. Drawing on data from learning journals in a L2 genre-based writing course for doctoral students in sciences, this study identified a continuum of stages in their reported self-efficacy for academic writing, including low, balanced, and emerging self-efficacy. Students' descriptions of metacognitive awareness of task perception encompassed awareness of rhetorical, content, and linguistic considerations. Analyses of how students reported metacognitive awareness of task perception and their self-efficacy revealed that low self-efficacy tended to co-occur with relatively sophisticated metacognitive awareness of rhetorical considerations, while emerging, positive self-efficacy seemed to co-occur with metacognitive awareness of content or language conventions. The study reveals the first-year doctoral students' miscalibration of self-efficacy for academic writing, posing a potential challenge for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing instructors to address in genre-based writing instruction. It also demonstrates the crucial role of mastery experience, vicarious experience, and emotional states in enhancing students’ academic writing self-efficacy, suggesting the necessity of providing opportunities for students to achieve success in writing, observe peers, and obtain positive feedback in L2 genre-based writing classrooms.