A Study On The Relationship Between Writing Anxiety And Writing Self-concept Of College Students

Writing, as a basic language skill for Chinese English learners, is also one of themost difficult skills to develop. Anxiety, as the most important affective factor inforeign language learning, has drawn much attention from the scholars both home andabroad. English self-concept is defined as learners’ perception and evaluation of theirlevel of English, their attitude to English as well as their learning abilities in Englishwriting, which is of certain significance in improving learners’ writing skill as amotivational feature in academic performance. Numerous studies on the relationshipbetween these two affective variables and language learning have been conducted.However, there has been very little research done to explore the relationship betweenforeign language writing anxiety and writing self-concept. The rarity of researchbetween these two constructs leaves us an incomplete picture of the nature of affectivefactors.This study reports an empirical study on foreign language writing anxiety andwriting self-concept of185Chinese non-English majors. In addition, the study on therelationship of these two variables, the difference of writing anxiety between high andlow writing self-concept groups as well as the predictive effect of the two variablesexerting on writing performance were also conducted in this paper. This studyemployed both qualitative and quantitative methods with questionnaire research andwriting test included. The research findings can be listed as follows:1. Collegestudents, in a general sense, are experiencing relatively high frequency of foreignlanguage writing anxiety but holding a low level f writing self-concept.2. Foreignlanguage writing anxiety is correlated with writing self-concept in a significantlynegative way, which means that the higher one’s writing self-concept is, the lesswriting anxiety one is likely to experience and vice versa.3. Between high and lowwriting self-concept groups, a significant difference is found in classroom teachinganxiety and conceiving anxiety while lack of confidence and avoidance behaviordon’t differentiate that much.4. Regression analysis conducted in the study showsthat gender and writing anxiety are significant predictive variables in writingperformance.Based on the findings and analyses mentioned above, this thesis suggested thatforeign language teachers should build positive atmosphere and inspire students’ writing interest so as to relieve their writing pressure, thus helping them develop apositive sense of writing self-concept during foreign language teaching. In addition,students with low self-perception or poor academic performance should be paid moreattention to, along with proper awards and compliments given from time to time.