Research On The Correlation Between Writing Anxiety Of Grade 8 Junior EFL Students And Writing Achievement

Nowadays,English teaching has concentrated more on learner’s learning process.Affective factors play an important role in the process of second language acquisition.Anxiety,as one of the key affective factors,has been paid attention to by scholars both domestically and abroad.The relevant research has gradually extended the study of anxiety in specific English skills.However,most of these studies took university and senior high school students as subjects,there are a few studies on the anxiety in English writing of junior high school students.Therefore,this study takes students in Grade 8 as subjects and investigates their anxiety levels.And based on this,the relationship between writing anxiety and their writing achievements is analyzed.Three questions are put forward as follows.1.Is there any English writing anxiety in Grade 8 Junior High School Students? If there is,in what aspects?2.Is there any relationship between English writing anxiety and writing achievement? If there is,what is it?3.Is there any difference in writing achievement for male and female students in anxiety?In order to answer the questions mentioned above,475 students Grade 8 of No.18 Junior High School in Yining City are selected.A questionnaire survey was carried out among them,and meanwhile,the writing achievements of the subjects were collected.On the basis of the collected data,descriptive analysis,independent T-test,correlation analysis and ANOVA were employed so that the relationship between the anxiety and achievements was analyzed.This study reveals the following findings.First of all,English writing anxiety does commonly exist among junior high school students and their overall levels of writing anxiety are moderate.The writing anxiety can be found mainly in three aspects which are known as somatic anxiety,cognitive anxiety and avoidance behavior anxiety.And in the three aspects,avoidance behavior occurs more often than cognitive anxiety,while there is no obvious occurrence of somatic anxiety.Secondly,there is a correlation between the writing anxiety and writing achievements which is negatively significant.That is to say,the higher their writing anxiety levels are,the poorer their writing achievements are.The anxieties of somatic,cognitive and avoidance three categories are all significant negatively correlated with writing achievement.Thirdly,the gender and the levels of English writing anxiety have a significant interactive effect on English writing achievement.The effects of writing anxiety on writing achievement show a significant gender differences.Females’ English writing achievementalways better than that of males’ in high,moderate and low anxiety level.At the end of this study,it is advocated that both teachers and students should focus on the causes of writing anxiety from the views of the examination pressure,lacking of confidence and worries about negative evaluation to reduce writing anxiety by employing scientific methods so that the writing achievements can be improved.