A Study On Reducing Non-English Majors’ Writing Anxiety By The Grammar Teaching

Anxiety as one of the affective factors has been widely proved to be one of the biggestobstacles for foreign language learning. So, many researchers were conducted to find someeffective ways to reduce learner’s foreign language anxiety. The present paper reports a studyon the non-English majors’writing anxiety which was caused by not enough grammar input.And this study presents the following questions: (1) How about the proficiency situation ofnon-English major students’writing and grammar’s level? (2) Do the non-English majorstudents have writing anxieties? Is the writing anxiety related to their grammar learning? (3)How to reduce the non-English major students’writing anxiety by the grammar teaching andlearning?The instruments include the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory developed byCheng (2004)’s SLWAI, Horwitz et al. (1986)’s FLCAS and Daly--Miller Test, a 25 termsgrammar test paper and a 120 words writing task in class time. It was found that Englishwriting anxiety which was related to grammar learning existed among undergraduates. Thestudy attempts to improve the students’writing scores by grammar teaching in class throughabout the 3 months class training. The data shows that English writing anxiety was negativelycorrelated with the composition scores and the grammar scores, but the grammar scores was positively correlated with composition scores. All the data analysis used was processed bySPSS, the data of T-test in pre-test and post-test was compared by not only shows thatEnglish writing anxiety influences English writing, but also it tells readers what role thegrammar teaching and learning play in reducing writing anxiety and improving compositionscores.