ESL writing teachers often deal with a heavy workload of giving feedback to students. Training students to self-assess their work can ease teachers' burdens; one self-assessment method is rubric training (RT), where teachers guide students in reading and grading sample essays. This research explores whether RT leads to positive emotional and regulatory gains. Twenty-one students enrolled in a first-year writing class received incremental exposure to RT. The same set of surveys, Self-efficacy Scale (SES) and Self-regulated Learning Perception Scale (SRLPS), was administered three times to measure the changes in their language self-efficacy (LSE) and self-regulated learning (SRL). The results were compared to the 15 students in the control group, where students also completed the same surveys on the same class days. Results showed that RT had a significant impact on students' LSE, but there was no presence of interaction or main effect for SRL. In post-assessment interviews, most students expressed feeling positive about RT because of the model essays; they learned about essay organization and coherence from the sample writing. However, some did not like the rubric because they thought it was difficult to read and the lexical complexity of the rubric was above students' reading level; it might be what made students feel less capable of completing the task. Still, LSE bridges students' self-assessment and language gains; therefore, RT should be used when teachers want to increase students' LSE.