Writing anxiety: a case study on students’ reasons for anxiety in writing classes

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was twofold. First, the present study set out to investigate the learners‟ attitudes towards academic writing courses that they have to take as part of their curriculum, whether they experience second language writing anxiety and what reasons they report for their anxiety and failure in academic writing courses. Second, the study aimed to develop a selfreport measure of second language writing anxiety reasons. In the first part of the study, 150 first year students took part. In the eighth week of 14-week semester, the participants were asked to write at least two paragraphs explaining and describing their attitudes and state their reasons of failure and the reasons of anxiety in writing courses. The student paragraphs were analyzed and their reasons were itemized and a Likert-type response format was adopted. The scale was administered twice to the first year students the following year. The scale was first administered in the 5th week of 14-week semester and it was administered three weeks later for a second time in order to examine the test-retest reliability. In order to evaluate the validity another measurement instrument which was modified from English Writing Apprehension Test developed by Daly and Miller (1975) was used. The four factors corresponded to the writing itself and writing course, writing skill, teacher and coursebook. To determine the internal consistency Cronbach‟s coefficient alfa was calculated. The results of the study are categorized into four. These are reasons related to how learners feel towards writing activity, writing as a skill, teacher and coursebook. Those learners who were asked to write paragraphs and those who answered the writing anxiety reasons scale claimed that they have writing anxiety and may fail because they do not have writing habit and they occasionally wrote in their previous experience and they are not used to writing and express themselves in writing because in their previous education they were familiar taking tests. Learners thought that they lack necessary strategies like organizing ideas, gathering information, combining ideas. Moreover, they thought that their English is not enough to express themselves clearly.