An Empirical Research On Chinese Writing Anxiety Of Foreign Preparatory Students In China

Carl Rogers, who is the Humanism representative, believes that meaningful learning is not only related to the cognitive level of learners, but also has a relationship with the emotional state of the learners. There are many emotional factors that can impact the language learning, such as personality, motivation, anxiety, and so on. Among these factors, anxiety is considered to be the biggest obstacle to meaningful learning. Writing is one of the output forms of language. The process of choosing words and building sentences is also a very complicated psychological process.They need to learn the language and grammar to combine pragmatic. So, writingl is defined as one of the most difficult output skills. Faced with the second language writing, many students often feel a headache, or even try to avoid writing assignment.Then it produces anxiety and stress, and this kind of negative emotion will have a bad impact on writing achievement. In recent years, research findings of second language writing center more on the writing motivation, writing attitude, but less on writing anxiety. In addtion, the Chinese-Writing Teaching in TCFL rarely pays attention to this topic, and the research findings about the preparatory foreign students of Chinese Government Scholorship are not very common. Based on the limitations of writing anxiety and the low writing competence of foreign preparatory students in China, it’s quite necessary to explore their writing anxiety through empirical research.This research takes the 136 preparatory foreign students of Chinese Government Scholorship of Shandong University (we call preparatory foreign students for short) as the object, and they are all the class of 2014. The main research methods of this paper are questionnaires method and interviews method.We converted the results of the questionnaire into data, and then analyzed it via the statistical software SPSS (22.0). All students took the HSK 5 examination on May 20th 2015. So we regarded the score of writing essays as the writing achievement. The issues below main research questions are:whether there is a correlation between writing anxiety and writing achievements of preparatory foreign students; the difference of writing anxiety of preparatory foreign students in many individual factors; whther writing anxiety of preparatory foreign students can predict writing achievements.The results showed that:(1) Descriptive analysis:preparatory foreign students sense the medium level of writing anxiety, and the classroom learning anxiety and writing anxiety have both similarities and differences; (2) Differences of the comparsion results:writing anxiety of preparatory foreign students is significantly different in many individual factors such as personality, self-assessment of Chinese proficiency, self-assessment of Chinese writing proficiency, self-learning expectation, subjective attitude towards the target language and the writing attitude. (3) Correlation analysis:Chinese writing anxiety is significantly and negatively correlated with their writing achievements and the three subscales of Chinese writing anxiety are all significantly and negatively correlated with writing achievements; writing anxiety has an inhibitory effect on students’writing achievements, the higher degree of the writing anxiety, this inhibition is more obvious. (4) Causes of Writing Anxiety:the main reason for their writing anxiety is the language elements obstacle. (5) Regression analysis:the dimensions of writing anxiety can significantly predict the writing performance.Therefore, reducing the Chinese writing anxiety of preparatory foreign students is necessary. Based on the results of this study, we propose how to reduce writing anxiety and improve their writing ability from the angle of teaching. Finally, we points out deficiencies and proposes directions for the future research.