Investigating Foreign Language Writing Anxiety Among Senior Middle School Students And Their Use Of Affective Strategies

Previous research in foreign language learning indicates that language anxiety can have a pervasive impact at all stages of language learning and production. In the foreign language class and tests, increased levels of anxiety can have a variety of negative effects on learners' learning and writing, while the learners' negative effects caused by anxiety can be controlled at a certain degree through their deploying affective strategies. This paper reports the author's findings on the writing anxiety and their affective strategies deployed by 120 senior middle school students of English as a foreign language in their writing classes or tasks. The levels of their writing anxiety and use of affective strategies were assessed through a process of introspection. Students were asked to answer the 38 questions of a questionnaire designed by the author, covering the writing anxiety and their affective strategies deployed to perform the writing task. The learners' levels of writing anxiety and their use of affective strategies were tallied, classified ,and analyzed.Analysis of the data shows that in the writing process all the senior middle school students experienced two kinds of writing anxieties to a certain extent: state writing anxiety and trait writing anxiety, and that they employed a certain kinds of affective strategies to accomplish their writing tasks and control their writing anxieties. The analysis of the data shows that writing anxieties have negative effect on these senior middle school students' writing. Evidence from this study also demonstrates that the use of affective strategies has moderate correlation with their writing achievements. On the basis of the results of the investigation, the author attempts to find out implications for senior middle school teachers in foreign language writing class.