| For many students, their previous experiences in English classes have not been pleasant ones; therefore, they approach the class with reservations and pessimistic attitudes. They have heard the horror stories of freshman English, and as one student remarked to me, they “just want to get through it.” The fact that some students view the writing classroom as a hostile environment has a negative effect on their writing ability. Somewhat uncomfortable with the process from the outset, students are petrified by the thought of the red pen bringing their grammatical and developmental errors to the surface. I have observed this fear of evaluation in my freshman composition classes at Macon State College. If students are to become less apprehensive and more effective writers, the classroom has to become a place where risk taking is encouraged in a nonthreatening manner. Through the voices of my students and my voice, this study develops a pedagogical approach for reducing writing apprehension.; The primary questions that this study seeks to answer are as follows: Do classroom practices affect writing apprehension, and to what degree do the instructional practices of one teacher, the researcher, reduce writing apprehension? Data for the study include a case study involving one class and such artifacts as a reflective research journal, course syllabus, lesson plans, a description of classroom practices, and samples of student work, The Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Scale, an accepted empirical method for measuring apprehension, developed by John A. Daly and Michael D. Miller in 1975, was administered as a pre-test and a post-test. All three major participants, two apprehensive and one nonapprehensive, had scores which reflected a reduction in apprehension on the post-test. In addition, through classroom observations and interviews with the major participants, it is also evident that they view the writing process more positively than they did at the beginning of the semester. |
