An Empirical Study Of Length Approach To Alleviate English Writing Anxiety Of Vocational College Students

Since the1980s, the focus of the research on foreign language teaching has graduallytransferred from teachers to learners, and learners’ internal emotional factors have received extensiveattention. As an important emotional factor in foreign language learning, anxiety has attracted a lot ofresearchers’ attention. Anxiety, as an important variable in emotional factors, exerts great influenceon the quality and quantity of foreign language writing. Writing anxiety refers to the learners’anxious behaviors in the process of writing, which is a kind of main learning disability that plaguesmany English learners. So far, few researches have been done on the part of writing anxiety,especially from the view of alleviating writing anxiety in order to improve the writing ability ofvocational college students. Length Approach, proposed by Professor Wang Chuming, is a newwriting pedagogy according to the English teaching situation in China based on second languageacquisition theories. Its basic assumption is that learners are pushed to write increasing longcompositions through adjusting the length requirement of writing gradually. Thus, it will increase theoutput of the target language, enhance the students’ sense of achievement, stimulate further learning,boost their confidence in their capacity to learn the foreign language, and eventually ensure progressin foreign language learning. Taking students’ emotion as the breakthrough, Length Approachadvocates promoting learning by writing which is a new way for the teaching of foreign languagewriting. Therefore, taking writing anxiety as the entry point, this thesis adopts the Length Approachto explore how the Length Approach helps vocational college students alleviate writing anxiety fromthe point of view of the empirical research, with the ultimate aim to improve students’ writing ability.The research dedicates to exploring the following two questions:(1) Can Length Approacheffectively alleviate vocational college students’ writing anxiety? If yes, how to alleviate?(2) CanLength Approach effectively improve the students’ writing competence? Therefore, taking the outputtheory, emotion theory and other theories as the theoretical basis, the author carried out the16-weekexperimental research in Shandong Xiehe Vocational College in the first half of2012. Eighty-twonon-English students from two parallel classes are chosen as the subjects of the study. One class israndomly selected as the experimental class and is taught by the Length Approach. Another class istreated as the control class and is taught by the conventional writing method. The researchinstruments in this teaching experiment include the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) compiled by Y-S Cheng, writing tests and interviews. The author uses quantitative researchmethods and inputs the collected experimental data into SPSS17.0. Through the comparative analysisof the writing anxiety questionnaires and the writing scores before and after the experiment, theauthor draws the experimental results combined with qualitative analysis of interviews obtained.The research results show that the Length Approach can effectively alleviate students’ writinganxiety. According to the comparison results of students’ writing anxiety before and after theexperiment, the change is mainly manifested in students’ cognitive anxiety and avoidance behavior.Besides, the Length Approach can effectively improve students’ writing ability. The research findingsverify that the Length Approach can effectively alleviate students’ writing anxiety and improvestudents’ writing competence by providing encouraging evaluation and a lot of opportunities forlanguage output.It can be concluded that the introduction of Length Approach into writing teaching is a feasibleand effective way to alleviate the vocational college students’ writing anxiety, enhance students’self-confidence in writing and strengthen writing motivation to improve writing ability. This studyoffers some pedagogical implications for the teaching of writing. However, due to the restrictions ofsome objective and subjective factors, such as the short experimental time, the existence ofuncontrollable variables and the author’s capacity, there are some inevitable limitations in thisresearch. In the end, the thesis points out the limitations of the research and provides direction forfurther researches.