Foreign language writing anxiety of prospective EFL teachers: How to reduce their anxiety levels

Anxiety has an important role in language learning, and there is a growing body of research into how it affects the acquisition of a second or foreign language. Most of this research has been dedicated to the oral aspects of language, however, in recent years, anxiety associated with the language skills of listening, reading and writing, namely "the language skill-specific anxiety" has attracted the attention of linguists and language pedagogues. As a productive skill, writing along with the anxiety it creates in the learner has begun to be examined by a number of studies in different educational contexts including prospective teachers of English.This study investigated the foreign language (L2) writing anxiety of prospective EFL teachers in a two-dimensional way. Since teachers constitute an important part of the classroom dynamics and they have the potential to be a source of anxiety for the learner, in this study, to research the issue of foreign language writing anxiety thoroughly, writing anxiety was explored not only from the perspectives of prospective teachers but also from the viewpoints of the English Language Teaching (ELT) instructors as well. Therefore, there were two subject groups in this study, one was prospective English teachers themselves, and the other was ELT instructorsRegarding the subject group of prospective teachers, this study was conducted among the students of the English Language Teaching department of a state university in Turkey. This group of participants consisted of 170 ELT students including freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. To analyze the nature and the influence of writing anxiety on this study group, first their levels of both general foreign language anxiety and L2 writing anxiety were measured using the instruments of the Foreign language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) developed by Horwitz et al. (1986) and the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) by Cheng (2004), then the factors which caused writing anxiety for them were elicited through the Questionnaire of the ESL Writing Anxiety (QCEWA) designed by Zhang (2011) and an open-ended question which asked them to elaborate on their sources anxiety that the QCEWA did not predict. The results showed that the prospective teachers generally experienced moderate levels of foreign language anxiety and L2 writing anxiety. It was also found that the freshmen and the sophomores manifested higher levels of both foreign language anxiety and L2 writing anxiety than the juniors and the seniors did, which indicated that language instruction can play a role in diminishing anxiety over time.This study also aimed to investigate the relationship between the general foreign language anxiety and L2 writing anxiety and to find out whether writing anxiety was distinct from foreign language anxiety or not, because before looking into the causes of writing anxiety it was necessary to establish the nature of this type of anxiety in the first place. The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient Analysis between the scores of the FLCAS and the SLWAI among this group of participants revealed that there was a positive linear correlation between the foreign language anxiety and L2 writing anxiety, and L2 writing anxiety was a type of anxiety which was distinct but related to the foreign language anxiety. Besides, since the SLWAI is an instrument integrating the subscales of cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and avoidance behaviour, the distributions of these subcategories were examined, and as a result, it was found that cognitive anxiety was the commonest type of writing anxiety experienced by prospective EFL teachersThe data elicited by the QCEWA administered to the prospective teachers revealed that there were eight main sources of writing anxiety among the subjects: lack of topical knowledge, linguistic difficulties, fear of negative evaluation, low self￾confidence, insufficient writing practice, insufficient writing techniques, lack of effective feedback and fear of tests. Apart from the factors in the QCEWA, the subjects also mentioned limited time, dislike of writing classes, having to obey the rules of writing compositions, thinking in L1, physical atmosphere of the classroom, advanced linguistic structures, different types of compositions and lack of topical terminology as the causes of their writing anxiety.As for the other group of participants, ELT instructors, an open-ended questionnaire was given to them asking them to reflect upon the causes of L2 writing anxiety among pre-service English teachers and to give suggestions as to how to deal with this problem. The ELT instructors thought that prospective EFL teachers' writing anxiety originated from linguistic factors, cognitive factors, affective factors, teaching procedures and student behaviour. Finally, they provided a number of coping strategies on both students' and teachers' parts.Key Words: Affective Factors in Language Learning, General Foreign Language Anxiety, Language Skill-specific Anxiety, Foreign Language Writing Anxiety