The Influence of Writing Anxiety to the English Writing Performance of Chinese High School Students: From the Perspective of the Writing Self-Efficacy文献综述

 2022-08-11 15:26:16

Literature Review

  1. Studies of English writing anxiety

In the four skills of foreign language learning, listening, speaking, reading and writing, many students are prone to have listening and speaking anxiety. In addition, students may also feel a sense of anxiety in reading and writing. Writing anxiety is a major affective disorder that restricts foreign language writing, which has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad. However, there are a considerable number of studies on listening and speaking anxiety at home and abroad, and the research on writing anxiety began in the 1970s. This part reviews some key researches and theories concerning anxiety and English writing anxiety.

    1. Definition of terms

Anxiety is the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system (Horwitz, 1986). It becomes a specific anxiety reaction when anxiety is limited to the language learning situation. Foreign language anxiety is a kind of situation-specific anxiety. Many scholars find foreign language learning is particularly stressful. Researchers did not distinguish foreign language anxiety from other types of anxieties, such as trait anxiety, state anxiety, or test anxiety until the mid-1980s.

Researchers at home and abroad possess different standard for the classification of anxiety. Horwitz (1986) believes that foreign language classroom apprehension can be divided into communication apprehension, text anxiety, besides with fear of negative evaluation. Eills (2000) believes that anxiety includes trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation specific anxiety. At home, Guo (2007) defined anxiety as an emotional state of nervousness, uneasiness, fear, and apprehension, which is mixing and intricate. According to Guo (2007), anxiety disorders can be classified into phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder.

The researchers start to study the writing anxiety and have different explanations of foreign language writing anxiety since 1970s.

Daly and Miller (1975) define writing anxiety as the performance acting by the learners during the writing process, including psychological states such as taking various actions to avoid writing tasks, having no response to writing, or being worried about their compositions read or reviewed by others. Daly and Wilson (1983) proposed that writing anxiety is not an ordinary psychological tension, but a higher degree of anxiety or fear. Writing anxiety can be a distraction for students. Horwitz (1986) puts forward that writing anxiety is the synthesis of self-consciousness, beliefs, emotions and behaviors. Subsequently, some researchers concretize writing anxiety into the context of foreign language learning. Matsuda and Gobel (2004) believe that foreign language writing anxiety is an apprehension trait producing in particular foreign language writing context. Learners are more likely to generate writing anxiety for they are using the foreign language that they cannot master well. Thus, they cannot employ the target language though to layout the whole text. Writing anxiety blocks writing process and causes learnersrsquo; difficulties in writing (Woodrow, 2011). Furthermore, the expectations of learners for successful writing turns lower due to the painful and negative emotional experience during the writing process.

    1. Related studies of English language anxiety on writing at home and abroad

Many researches have been made based on the writing anxiety, especially foreign language writing anxiety. Krashen (1982) states that foreign language writing had more anxiety experience than native language writing, and foreign language writing anxiety was a particular language learning anxiety. In school education, foreign language classroom anxiety is regarded as speaking anxiety, while second language writing anxiety is regarded as language skills anxiety.

At home, studies of English writing anxiety focus more on the influences of writing anxiety and approaches which educators can apply to deal with writing anxiety. Zheng Dinming (2005) used 60 non-English major sophomores as the investigation samples and investigated their writing anxiety, writing grades, fluency as well as the error rate. Research results manifested that most students were experiencing a relatively high level of English writing anxiety during the process of English writing. Liu Guoqing (2007) pointed out that writing anxiety was a negative emotional experience which students show in the writing process and it has intricate formations together with the elimination process.

Guo Yan and Qin Xiaoqing (2010) research into 453 non-English major students writing anxiety status by questionnaire and interview, and find that foreign language writing anxiety is prevail among college students, including classroom teaching anxiety, conception anxiety, avoidance as well as confidence anxiety.

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