Writing anxiety: a case study on students’ reasons for anxiety in writing classes
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2013Author
Anadolu Üniversitesi
Kara, Selma
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Kara, S. (2013). Writing anxiety: a case study on students’ reasons for anxiety in writing classes. Anadolu Journal of Educational Sciences International (AJESI), 3 (1), 103-111.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.