The Influence Of Writing Apprehension On Writing Performance Of English Majors

According to the Training Aims and Teaching Principles of "Syllabus for English Majors in China", writing is one of the most important professional skills English majors need to cultivate. Meanwhile, writing is also the important and difficult point of English writing teaching. Affective factors play a crucial role in writing process especially anxiety. When confronted with writing tasks, students will feel anxiety and pressure to some extent. Therefore, the study of FL writing anxiety is of great value to help to improve students’ writing performance and provide suggestions for English writing teaching. In recent years, studies on FL writing anxiety in China and abroad have received more and more attention, most of which have mainly explored the overall situation of writing anxiety of Chinese students and the relationship between writing anxiety and writing performance. These researches mainly adopt writing scores as the measurement of writing performance. Zheng (2005) and Lester Faigley&Daly&Witte (1981) has selected other indices to measure writing performance such as fluency, complexity of T-unit, error rate, the mean length of T-unit&clauses and frequency of nonrestrictive modifiers and examined the correlation between these indexes and writing anxiety.In order to study the influence of writing anxiety on writing performance which is measured from a more comprehensive perspective, the present research explores the influence of FL writing anxiety on English majors’writing performance measured by holistic scores and the internal characteristics of writing including the mean length of T-unit (W/T), mean length of clauses (W/C), clauses per T-unit (C/T) and dependent clauses per clause (DC/C). The present study tries to answer the following questions:1) What is the overall writing anxiety of all the students?2) Whether the high and low score groups of writing anxiety has a significant difference in writing scores? What is the relationship between writing anxiety and writing scores?3) Whether the high and low score groups of writing anxiety has a significant difference in the internal characteristics of writing? What is the relationship between writing anxiety and the internal characteristics of writing?SPSS16.0were applied to analyze the data. The author discussed the results of data and came to the following conclusions. 1) The Descriptive Statistics shows the level of students’ overall writing anxiety is moderate. Cognitive writing anxiety is experienced the most, then is the avoidance behavior and the somatic writing anxiety is experienced the least.2) The Independent-Samples T Test reveals that the high and low score group of overall writing anxiety and avoidance behavior both have significant differences in writing scores, meanwhile overall writing anxiety and its three subscales all have no significant differences in the internal characteristics of writing.3) Person Correlation Analysis indicatess that only avoidance behavior is statistically negatively correlated with writing scores and the mean length of T unit (W/T).The findings of the study are of great help to English writing teaching for English majors in China. In order to reduce students’ cognitive writing anxiety, teachers should change the traditional way of evaluating students’ writings in writing teaching, adopting some methods such as cooperative learning and peer response to make students undertake writing tasks in a relaxed and pleasant environment. Concerning the ways to decrease students’ avoidance behavior, teachers should actively create more opportunities for students to do writing exercises and give encouragement and positive evaluation to students’writing, raising students’ interest in writing and making students have more confidence when facing writing tasks. Furthermore, teachers should emphasize on improving learners’language abilities including syntactic ability as well as text structure for the purpose of developing learners’mature and complicated syntactic ability. Students should be encouraged to use more clauses especially substantive clause like attributive clause, apposive clause and so on as well as cultivating students to use more adverb phrase, adjective phrase and noun verb phrase to increase the length of T-unit.