An Empirical Study On The Influences Of Teachers’ Written Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Anxiety

English writing as a language skill is important to measure the language learners’ overall ability and to help learners consolidate their basic English competency. Therefore, English writing occupies a significant place in the New English Curriculum Standard for our Chinese senior high school students to master. However, for a long time, English writing has been the weakest part in English teaching in that it is often arranged after the other three skills of listening, speaking, and reading. Such a fact results in quite a lot of difficulties for the teaching of English writing in high school and makes the teaching less satisfactory. There are of course a number of factors accounting for it, one of them being that language learners are used to expressing themselves by means of the mother tongue. Besides, Chinese students are mostly affected by the language anxiety which is produced in the process of writing.Language anxiety proves to be a main obstacle that is confronted by all foreign language learners. It is generally acknowledged that anxiety as one of the most important affective variables plays a rather important role in foreign language learning. As some studies indicate, if students show anxiety in the English learning, they will lose heart and interest in studying English. What’s more, too high or too low anxiety will have a bad effect on students’ learning, and only the moderate anxiety can promote students’ English acquisition. In consequence, helping learners to reduce the language anxiety, especially the English writing anxiety, has become an urgent and important issue in senior high school English teaching in China.The theoretical foundation of the study is Affective Filter Hypothesis. From the perspective of teachers’ written feedback in senior high school writing teaching, the author aims to find out the influences of teachers’ written feedback on senior high school students’ writing anxiety. The study subjects are 98 students of Grade One who come from Liaohe Oilfield No.3 Senior High School in Pan Jin City. This research was implemented from September to November in 2014. The author adopted qualitative and quantitative studies using two questionnaires and one interview to get the related information. In the study, the author applies the SLWAI which was developed by Cheng as research frameworks to design two questionnaires. The first questionnaire is about the senior high school students’ writing anxiety, and the second is the questionnaire about the influences of teachers’ written feedback on students’ writing anxiety. In addition, the author devised an interview outline and conducted an open-ended interview on teachers.According to three-month investigation, the author made two findings in the study: First, all the 98 students experienced different levels of anxiety in English writing, and the degree of their anxieties was relatively moderate. Second, teachers’ written feedback do have an impact on students’ writing anxiety. And the time constraint and gender difference and the fear of negative evaluation will cause the anxiety in writing. According to the three months’ investigation, the author proved the fact that teachers’ written feedback did have impact on students’ writing anxiety, and most students need teachers’ encouraging words and positive feedback. The encouraging words and positive feedback can do a favor to reduce students’ writing anxiety. Therefore, the author hopes that this study can arouse teachers’ awareness of applying written feedback properly and eventually help students improve their writing ability.