A Study On The Correlation Between English Writing Anxiety Of College Students And Their Writing Proifciency

As a significant affective factor influencing foreign languageteaching and the second language teaching, emotion in language teachinghas drawn great attention by many scholars and anxiety becomes the keypoint. Krashen believes that anxiety is the most harmful affective factorinfluencing the learning outcome of second language acquisition. Writinganxiety has been identified as a significant construct for understanding thefactors that influence students’development of writing skill. As one ofthe significant factors that affect second language acquisition, writinganxiety also plays a negative role in improving learners’writing ability.The study of writing anxiety started in the 1970s. Since then, manyscholars have devoted a lot of time and efforts to the research of this area.The major purposes of this study are to investigate the overall stateof college non-English majors’English writing anxiety and its influenceon writing proficiency, to explore the difference in writing proficiencyamong students of different writing anxiety levels, and to find out thepotential sources of leading to writing anxiety on writing proficiency inChinese context. The English writing proficiency of students is measuredby their CET-6writing scores and the data of the study is collected via aquestionnaire survey and half-open interviews.This study is made a subject sample of 460 non-English majors fromthe sophomore of Changsha University of Science and Technology usingstratified random sampling method. The instruments are Chinese-versionBackground Information of the subjects and the English Writing AnxietyInventory (SLWAI), writing proficiency test of CET-4 and interviews.With the help of advanced statistical methods, this research not only investigate the overall level of non-English majors’English writinganxiety, but also weighs the relationship between writing anxiety andwriting proficiency and explores the difference in writing proficiencyamong students of different writing anxiety levels. Apart from that, theauthor picks out 12 subjects with obvious anxiety symptoms whenwriting to conduct half-open interviews with the method of purposivesampling, in the hope of discovering the sources of emergence of anxietyin writing proficiency. The qualitative data is used to supplement theresults of the previous quantitative research．The results indicate that non-English majors experience a moderatelevel of English writing anxiety, which is common and general; there issignificantly negative correlation between writing anxiety and subjects’writing proficiency; the higher the anxiety level is, the lower the writingachievement is; there is significant difference among students of differentanxiety levels in English writing achievement; no matter what the writinganxiety level is, it has no positive influence on writing achievement. It isalso discovered that sources of lack of writing practices, lack of adequatewriting knowledge, test anxiety, lack of writing confidence and fear ofnegative evaluation may contribute a lot to anxiety in writingachievement.Based on the research findings mentioned above, the authorproposes some pedagogical implications on how to relieve Englishwriting anxiety and improve writing proficiency. Finally, the limitationsof the present study as well as some suggestions for future researches arepointed out.