A Study On Correlation Among English Writing Anxiety,Writing Self-Efficacy And Writing Performance Of Senior High School Students

As two important influencing factors in second language acquisition,foreign language anxiety and self-efficacy has been attached great importance by linguists and educators since the 1970 s.These two factors are considered to have a great effect on the second language acquisition.Writing is an important part in high school English learning.A large number of studies have shown that writing anxiety and self-efficacy affect the level of writing.However,there are scarce studies on the connection between writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy.Moreover,researchers tend to focus on college students rather than high school students.What's more,researchers are likely to pay their attention to students' overall English scores rather than their writing scores.Therefore,this study intends to explore the relationship among senior high school students' English writing anxiety,writing self-efficacy and writing achievement.This study mainly sought to solve the following three questions: first,what is the current situation of high school students' English writing achievement,writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy? Second,what is the connection among writing anxiety,writing self-efficacy and writing achievement? Third,can writing self-efficacy and writing anxiety predict writing achievement? If yes,how do they affect students' writing performance?In order to answer the above three research questions,170 senior middle school students in Fengcheng City were involved in the investigation.In order to ensure the validity of the results,the researchers conducted a pilot study to verify the reliability of the two questionnaires before the formal investigation.After obtaining the effective reliability of the two questionnaires,the author employed them in the formal investigation.Data were collected by completing Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory and Second Language Writing Self-efficacy Inventory and assigning three writing tasks.The author used SPSS 20.0 to analyze the data,including descriptive analysis,correlation analysis,multiple regression analysis and path analysis.Based on the results of data analysis,the findings are as follows.1)High school students generally have a moderate level of English writing anxiety.Among the threecomponents of writing anxiety,avoidance behavior gets the highest mean score,followed by somatic anxiety and cognitive anxiety.Writing with time restriction is the main cause of their writing anxiety.High school students' self-efficacy in English writing is generally at a low level.Students are not very confident in their writing skills.And their negative attitudes about writing tasks also lead to a low level of writing self-efficacy.Students' English writing scores are below the average level.2)Writing anxiety was negatively correlated with students' writing scores,but writing self-efficacy had a positively significant connection with writing performance.The results of Pearson Correlation Analysis revealed that writing anxiety is directly and negatively relevant to students' writing self-efficacy.3)Writing anxiety cannot directly predict writing achievement,but writing self-efficacy can.But in the light of the result of path analysis,writing anxiety can influence writing performance by the inter-mediation of writing self-efficacy indirectly.In the last chapter,the author analyzed some pedagogical implications of this study to English writing for the purpose of alleviating students' writing anxiety and enhancing students' writing ability.