The Effect Of The Comparative Continuation On Second Language Writing Anxiety

Writing anxiety mainly refers to learners' anxious behaviors that learners confront in the process of writing or face with writing tasks.Writing anxiety,a main learning disorder that troubles many L2 learners,has great influence on the quality of second language(L2)writing.Till now,L2 writing anxiety has attracted a number of researchers' attentions.However,the effective ways of alleviating L2 writing anxiety are still underdeveloped.Thus,exploring appropriate and effective methods to relieve learners' L2 writing anxiety is especially significant.Integrating reading and writing,the continuation task has been proved to have the facilitative effect on L2 learning.As the variant of the continuation task,the comparative continuation not only has the same mechanism of promoting language learning as the continuation task,but also is its supplement and perfection,which can maximize the learning effect of the task.However,the comparative continuation is newly proposed,thus the empirical research is necessarily and urgently conducted to investigate its facilitative effect.Therefore,combining the comparative continuation with the writing anxiety,the present study aims to investigate the effect of the comparative continuation on learners' L2 writing anxiety.Specifically,the current study intends to explore 1)the relationship between L2 writing performance and L2 writing anxiety,and 2)the effectiveness of the comparative continuation on L2 writing anxiety.To this end,an empirical study was conducted.A total number of 44English-major sophomores from two natural classes participated in this study and the two classes were randomly assigned to the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC).The participants in the EC were required to complete the comparative continuation task.They were instructed to read one English argumentative essay which stated a certain viewpoint,then to write a new argumentative essay thatsupported the opposite view to the one presented in the reading material.While the participants in the CC were required to finish the topic writing task,that is,they wrote an argumentative essay on the same topic as EC but without any reading materials.Research was conducted in three steps: 1)the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(SLWAI)questionnaire was distributed to get participants' L2 writing anxiety at the onset of the experiment;2)in the experiment,each participant was required to finish two writing tasks,namely the comparative continuation task and the topic writing task,and complete the related SLWAI questionnaires immediately after each writing;3)ten participants were selected to have a further semi-structured interview at the end of the experiment.The collecting data were processed both through quantitative and qualitative analysis.Pearson correlation test,independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test were adopted to analyze the quantitative data.And the semi-structured interviews were transcribed for qualitative analysis.The results of the study showed that: 1)learners' L2 writing performance was negatively correlated with L2 writing anxiety,especially with the conceiving anxiety.The higher the L2 writing anxiety,the worse the L2 writing performance;2)There was a statistically significant difference in alleviating L2 writing anxiety between EC and CC.Learners' L2 writing anxiety,particularly the conceiving anxiety and classroom teaching anxiety were significantly reduced in the experimental class,while no significant differences were found in the control class.On the basis of the above results,it can be concluded that there is a negative relationship between L2 writing performance and L2 writing anxiety;the comparative continuation is a feasible and effective way to alleviate learners' L2 writing anxiety.Combining comprehension with production,creation with imitation,and learning with application,the comparative continuation can stimulate learners' desire to communicate and address learners' difficulties in language use.In other words,the input text in comparative continuation serves as the writing model and scaffolding,providing learners with inspiration of how to conceive contents.Besides,Whenlearners have difficulties in expressions or are not sure about some language usages,they can imitate the original words and expressions in the text,and then creatively use them.In a word,in the comparative continuation,learners construct the contents based on the text they read and imitate the useful expressions and language from the input text if necessary,which greatly reduces their writing anxiety.