A Study On The Factors Affecting English Writing Anxiety Of English Majors

In recent years,research into second language(L2)writing anxiety abroad and in China has obtained increasing attention,which is mainly related to aspects of how to define and measure L2 writing anxiety,its impacts on language learning,its inducing causes,and strategies to alleviate it.Despite those there has been relatively little research into L2 writing anxiety focusing on the dynamic changes of the factors affecting students' English writing anxiety among different grades.Therefore,in light of the problems above,the purpose of this study is to investigate the situation of English majors' English writing anxiety,to probe into changes of six concrete dimensions from grade one to grade four vertically and compare their differences horizontally and to analyze the possible reasons.This study mainly aims to answer the following four research questions:1)What is the overall situation of factors affecting English writing anxiety?2)How do the six concrete dimensions change from grade one to grade four?3)How do those six dimensions differ from each other at each grade?4)Why do those six dimensions affecting writing anxiety have such differences and changes?This empirical study involved 252 English majors in college from grade one to grade four as participants in virtue of quantitative and qualitative methods,namely,questionnaire and interview respectively.Based on Bai(2017)'s dimensions of inducing factors affecting English writing anxiety,a new questionnaire was designed and adopted in this study.A final total of 232 valid questionnaires was took back.After all the effective data were collected,SPSS 25.0 was employed to conduct descriptive analysis,which was used to investigate overall situation and differences and changes of dimensions of English majors' English writing anxiety.On the other hand,this study also interviewed 8 students(2 students at each grade)to summarize the deep causes behind those differences and changes.Based on the collected data of questionnaires and the answers of interviews,the following conclusion can be drawn:1)most English majors are suffering from English writing anxiety moderately and a small part of them are highly anxious about it;2)students' all pairwise dimensions of English writing anxiety except the two between discourse competence and written text characteristics groups,evaluation feedback and output modes groups are significantly different;3)most dimensions have a significant change from grade one or two to grade three or four,and all dimensions show a downtrend from grade one to grade four on the whole;4)and the reasons behind those differences and changes are students' different attitude toward English writing,different degree of confidence,different foundation of Chinese and other factors on the one hand,and increasing difficulty of writing,stricter requirement of tests,increasing self-request,and enriching knowledge of English and writing,more practicing,and more steady English foundation on the other hand.