The Classroom Anxiety: A Study Of The College Students' Writing Performances And Strategies Uses

Since 1970s, the second language acquisition has gradually aroused people's interest, many linguists and researchers have paid much attention to learners' affective variables, shifting from the focus on external factors of foreign language learning to the internal factors, which have great influence on the foreign language learning and the choice of the learning strategies. Affective variables have become one of the major concerns. In Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, the main point is that the learners' second language acquisition has direct relation to the learners' attitude, which was influenced by the many factors, including anxiety. As one of the affective variables, anxiety has aroused great attention since the first probe in this field by Horwitz in 1980s. MacIntyre (1994) pointed that anxiety has influence on the learning. MacIntyre & Noels (1996) got the conclusion that the language anxiety negatively correlated with the choice of the learning strategies based on their previous studies. However, the majority of these studies just focused on the general foreign language anxiety, studies on the specific foreign language skills are rare, although there existed some studies on reading and listening by the researchers to specify. As one of the important basic skills of the foreign language, English writing has been paid much attention, but few studies have been done to probe into the situation of Chinese college students writing anxiety and strategies, especially writing classroom anxiety, which was commonly considered as the big problem in their learning. Therefore, there is an urgent need to investigate on writing anxiety, writing performance and writing strategies.Based on the Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, altogether 83 freshmen major in Chinese Language and Literature and Applied Electronic Technology from Shaanxi Normal University were selected randomly to participate in this study. The investigation includes the writing tasks which topics were chose from the CET-4 exam, the employment of the questionnaires which were rewritten and amended on the basis of the FLCAS and the strategies questionnaire designed by Oxford, the interview to figure out the writing anxiety, performance and strategies employment of different genders. The statistics were collected and consequently analyzed by the SPSS 13.0. This thesis tries to present the investigation and discussion on the following questions: (1) what is the main situation on anxiety of the Chinese college students? Are there any differences on the different genders? (2) What is the correlation between writing anxiety and writing performance? What is the difference on performance of different genders? (3) what is the correlation between writing strategies and writing performance? (4) what is the relation between writing anxiety and strategies employment in writing?The results showed that:( 1) writing anxiety is a common phenomenon and widely spread among Chinese college students which may come from several aspects, such as the fear of the negative evaluation and lack of confidence etc; male students with a relative higher anxiety level. (2)The writing anxiety is negatively correlated with the writing performance (the Pearson Correlation efficient is -.776), the performance of the female students are much better than the males' (M=10.49>9.06). (3)The employment of the strategies in writing is moderately correlated with the writing performance (the Pearson Correlation efficient is.524), which can cause the differences on the writing performance. In general, the student can frequently adopt the metacogntive strategies frequently than the use of the social-affective strategies. (4)The more strategies the learner adopted, the better performance they achieved and the lower anxiety they had.The results of this thesis mainly aimed to help the teachers to realize and attach importance to the college students writing anxiety so that the negative influence of the writing anxiety on the choice of writing strategies and performance can be reduced and the build of the students' confidence by adopting the appropriate teaching and strategies training methods. Meanwhile, the students' interest in English writing can also be aroused and activated.