The Correlation Of English Majors’ Writing Anxiety,Written Communication Strategies And Writing Achievements

Since the research focus of applied linguistics shifted from "teaching" to "learning", overwhelming attention has been paid to learner’s affective domains and learning strategies. Foreign language learning anxiety, among other affective factors, has stimulated particular interest. A large number of researches have been carried out to explore the effects of anxiety on specific language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, among which writing gets less attention. Communication strategies, as the means adopted by SL learners to deal with the communicative problems caused by their deficient SL knowledge, have evoked a multitude of researches. However, the overwhelming attention is drawn to CSs in oral communication, with those in written communication almost ignored. Previous studies proved that foreign language learning anxiety and communication strategies could influence language achievements. But there is no final conclusion of the relationship among the three aspects in writing.The present study relates WA and WCSs to writing achievements, takes the202English majors from TUST as the subjects, and adopts questionnaire, test and interview in the research that combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The quantitative data are entered into the computer and processed and analyzed by SPSS19.0in order to figure out the correlation of them. Then a semi-structured interview is followed to offer a supplementary support to the findings of the quantitative analysis. The questions under investigation include:(1) What is the general situation of English majors’WA and their employment of WCSs?(2) What is the correlation between WA and writing achievements?(3) What is the correlation between WCSs and writing achievements?(4) What is the correlation between WA and WCSs?The major findings are as follows:(1) The tendency of English WA is not so obvious among the English majors in TUST. Nevertheless, there are still a quarter of the subjects suffering from certain second language WA. Among the three subscales of WA suffered by the subjects, Cognitive Anxiety is found to be the highest, Avoidance Behavior being in the second position, and Somatic Anxiety being the lowest. The subjects’ WA is mainly caused by inconfidence, personality, language proficiency, instructor, and writing context.(2) WCSs are widely employed among the subjects and the most widely used strategies are Retrieval Strategies, followed closely by Avoidance Strategies, then Compensatory Strategies, with Repetition Strategies being the last. Among three subcategories of Avoidance Strategies, Simplification is the most widely adopted one, while Message Abandonment is the least one. As to Compensatory Strategies, all the L2-based Strategies (Word Coinage and L2Thinking excluded), L1Thinking in L1-based Strategies, all the Knowledge-based Strategies (Picture Drawing excluded) and Looking Up Dictionaries in Co-operative Strategies are more widely used.(3) Writing achievement is neither correlated to WA nor WCSs.(4) Among the four subcategories and the overall WCSs, only Avoidance Strategies and Repetition Strategies show some low correlations to WA, but not Cognitive Anxiety.Based on the above findings, the author puts forward some pedagogical implications, aiming to help the learners adjust their learning to improve SL writing and inspire the instructors to generalize some efficient teaching methods for SL writing to assist learners to overcome WA and enhance communicative competence.