Utilizing Blended Learning To Develop Preparatory School Students’ EFL Writing Skills and Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Writing is one of the four skills that require special attention as it is a productive language process and plays a great role in conveying a written message accurately and effectively. Moreover, it is necessary in everyday life, in business and scholarly pursuits. It is a communicative skill to send, store and retrieve messages with the help of written symbols. It provides a permanent record of information, opinions, beliefs, feelings, arguments, explanation and theories. It allows learners to share communication not only with contemporaries, but also with future of past generations . In spite of the importance of writing, it still seems to be the most difficult language skill for language learners to acquire. It has been proved that EFL learners writing self-efficacy level has been linked to their poor performance in writing. Williams,H. (2012) stated that self-efficacy is a key for success in writing. Alegro, (2006) defined self-efficacy as a belief that one can complete specific learning tasks effectively. The beliefs learners have about their ability to learn can be described as self-regulating which can regulate the ways in which the students approach the learning task as well as how they respond in classroom settings.