An Investigation On English Writing Anxiety And Self-regulation Strategies Of Vocational High School Students

The rise and development of humanistic psychology has shifted the focus of foreign language learning from “teaching” to “learning”.The influence of emotional factors such as anxiety,personality,self-confidence and motivation on learner's foreign language learning process and results has attracted researchers' attention.Among them,anxiety is one of the most important influential factors.Previous researches reveal that writing learning is affected by writing anxiety,which is negatively related to writing achievement and writing level.In a large number of empirical studies on writing anxiety,the focus is on how to help students reduce or overcome anxiety from external factors such as teachers.However,studies on through learner's own efforts to reduce anxiety are relatively insufficient,that is,through self-regulation strategies.Self-regulation is an essential internal factor in the regulation of anxiety.Similarly,self-regulation in writing anxiety is also one of the important factors to relieve writing anxiety.Most of studies choose college students as research subjects and there remain very little researches that take vocational high school students as research subjects.Secondary vocational education is highly valued and strongly supported by the Hebei Provincial Government and the country.Previous teaching practice shows that the problems in vocational high school students' writing process are mainly concentrated on problems such as writing anxiety.Therefore,this study aims to study English writing anxiety and self-regulation strategies in writing anxiety whose research subjects are vocational high school students.This research mainly figures out the following three issues:1.What is the current situation of vocational high school students' writing anxiety?2.What is the general situation of the use of self-regulation strategies in vocational high school students' writing anxiety?3.What are the differences in writing anxiety self-regulation strategies used by vocational high school students with different writing anxiety levels ?This study takes Hebei Huanghua Vocational Education Center as an example.A total of 368 students from three grades of vocational high school participated in the survey.The research tools are the “Second Language Writing Anxiety Scale” by Cheng(2004)translated and adapted by Guo Yan and Qin Xiaoqing(2010)and the “English Writing Anxiety Self-Regulation Strategy Scale” by Ma Jie and Dong Pan(2017).Previous studies indicate that the reliability and validity of the two scales are high,which are suitable for further research.After collecting research data,SPSS 22.0 data processing software is used for statistics and analyses.This study mainly draws the following conclusions:(1)Students generally experience moderate levels of English writing anxiety and it is high in this range.(2)The use of self-regulation strategies in writing anxiety is at a moderate level and it is low in this range.Conception strategy,affective strategy and avoidance strategy are self-regulation strategies that are employed more frequently while action strategy is applied less frequently.(3)Students with different levels of English writing anxiety have significant differences in the use of action strategy,conception strategy and avoidance strategy(p <0.001)and there exists no significant difference in the use of affective strategy(p> 0.05).The lower anxiety the students have,the more active self-regulation strategies will be chosen including action strategy,conception strategy and affective strategy.And the higher anxiety level the students are at,the more negative avoidance strategy is adopted.It is hoped that the results of this research will enrich the study of English writing anxiety and self-regulation strategies and be instructive for students' writing learning and teachers' writing teaching.For students,it is valuable to assist them to understand the situation of writing anxiety and on this basis,they can choose to use positive self-regulation strategies in writing anxiety.For teachers,it helps teachers to fix more attention on students' emotional factors,especially the anxiety.Teachers can have a more objective understanding of writing anxiety and self-regulation strategies,adjust writing teaching methods in a timely manner according to students and current situation and guide students to adopt positive self-regulation strategies to ease writing anxiety.