A Survey Of English Writing Anxiety Among English Majors

Anxiety is an important factor that has an influence on foreign language learning.English learners should master four skills, including listening, speaking, reading andwriting when they begin to learn English. Many students would experience anxiety inlistening and speaking. Besides, students may more or less experience writing andreading anxiety. The study of writing anxiety began in the1970s, and since then somescholars have devoted lots of time to the research of this issue and end with differentconclusions.With Daly, Horwitz and Y-S-Cheng’s theoretical model of second languagewriting anxiety as research framework, this thesis surveyed English majors’ Englishwriting anxiety. Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(SLWAI) developed byY-S Cheng(2004) was used to measure the levels of students’ writing anxiety in thisstudy. With the help of the quantitative approach, we investigated whether Englishmajors experience anxiety in English writing, examined the correlation between thewriting anxiety and grade, explored whether there is difference in English writinganxiety between the students who hold positive attitudes towards English writingand those who hold negative attitudes towards English writing, whether there isdifference in English writing anxiety between the students who evaluate their Englishwriting good and those who evaluate their English writing bad. In addition, with thehelp of the qualitative approach, we made an exploration of the potential sources ofEnglish major students’ writing anxiety and the reasons why there is no hugedifference in English writing anxiety among students from different grades.The subjects surveyed in this study are all from English major of foreignlanguage school in a normal university in Jiang Xi province. In total,220students areinvolved in this study, including77freshmen,78sophomores and65juniors. Findings of the present study show that all of the English major studentsexperience English writing anxiety. There is no significant difference in Englishanxiety among students from three different grades. There is significant difference inEnglish writing anxiety between the students who hold positive attitudes towardsEnglish writing and those who hold negative attitudes towards English writing andthere is significant difference in English writing anxiety among students who ratedtheir English writing good, average and bad. Results from the qualitative study showthat the reasons why there is little difference in English writing anxiety amongstudents from three different grades are that they all have the similar self disciplines,ways of learning and training strategies. What’s more, it is shown that the poorwriting skills, cognitive anxiety, test anxiety and erroneous beliefs toward Englishwriting are the main sources of English writing anxiety. Meanwhile, in order not toexperience writing anxiety, students are more likely to avoid English writing whenthey are in the anxious situation. So this kind of avoidance behavior would preventstudents from catching the writing chances and thus makes their writing anxietyincrease.This study is of pedagogical significance in that it helps us understand ChineseEnglish learners’ feelings about English writing. And there are some ways suggestedin this study to alleviate students’ writing anxiety, such as practicing thinking inEnglish, increasing the opportunities of language input and output and making usingof team cooperation.