A Survey Of English Writing Anxiety Of High School Students

In the process of English learning,it is composed of listening,speaking,reading and writing.English writing is one of the four basic skills of English learning,which is regarded as the most fundamental and difficult skill for Chinese EFL students to master.Admittedly,English writing ability can represent learners' output level.At the same time,it can also demonstrate learners' English comprehensive ability.In College Entrance English Examination,the score of English writing takes a great proportion of the total English score.However,in reality,the score of high school students' English writing is not satisfactory.The score of high school students' English writing is affected by various factors.With the development of foreign language teaching,the key focus of the foreign language teaching has altered form “focus on the teachers' teaching” to “focus on the students' learning”.Language researchers and teachers begin to pay much attention to the difference of learners and the affective variables of the learners.Emotional factors gradually attract a great number of researchers' attention.Anxiety is one of the most important affective factors which have a great effect on English writing.English writing anxiety can impede the improvement of learners' writing ability.However,there are many previous studies about the English learning anxiety which mainly focus on the general foreign language anxiety.Although they have already paid much attention to the language-skill-specific-anxiety in recent years,the major concern of researcher is speaking and listening anxiety.Though there are studies on writing anxiety in foreign language learning,most of the researchers take the university students as their subjects.There are fewer studies to explore high school students' English writing anxiety.Under this circumstance,it is necessary to do the research on English writing anxiety of high school students and examine the causes of English writing anxiety of high school students.This study investigates the general situation of English writing anxiety of high school students in Qu Zhou high school.This study aims to provide some useful suggestions for improving high school students' English writing ability.The research questions are as follows:1 What is the general situation of English writing anxiety of high schoolstudents?2 What are the causes of high school students' English writing anxiety?This study primarily investigates the general situation of high school students' English writing anxiety.The author takes 100 high school students in grade one in Qu Zhou high school as participants.At the same time,this study is composed of two research instruments: questionnaire and interview.The collected data is processed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences(SPSS 13.0).The writer uses descriptive statistics to analyze the collected data to investigate high school students' English writing anxiety.The author also holds interviews with high school students,thus the author can summarize the causes of writing anxiety and provide some suggestions to help reduce students' English writing anxiety.Based on the collected data of the questionnaire and the answers of the interview,the author finds that the high school students in Qu Zhou experience the English writing anxiety.The English writing anxiety of these high school students is in the medium level.Lack of enough writing knowledge and writing skills is the main cause of English writing anxiety.Finally,based on the analysis of the research findings and results,the author puts forward some related suggestions for high school students to reduce their English writing anxiety and help them improve their English writing ability.The writer also provides some suggestions for high school English teachers to improve their English teaching.