Testing pre-task expressive writing as an emotional-offloading strategy in evaluative L2 writing

Choking under pressure occurs when evaluative concerns consume limited cognitive resources and weaken attentional control during demanding tasks such as L2 writing. Pre-task expressive writing (EW) may externalize task-related worries, but its value in evaluative L2 writing remains uncertain. This 2 × 3 factorial study examined intervention type (EW vs. active neutral writing [NW]) and language modality among 207 EFL university students who completed a timed argumentative task after a 20-minute pre-task activity. Open-ended responses formed an embedded qualitative component. Confirmatory analyses found no evidence that writing-anxiety scores differed across measurement occasions by intervention type or language modality. EW also showed no incremental advantage over NW in posttest performance. Although a multivariate intervention type × language modality interaction emerged across four writing dimensions, no dimension-specific effect survived Bonferroni correction. The secondary associational analysis found no conditional indirect association through retrospectively reported cognitive load. Qualitative accounts contextualized these results: only a minority of EW participants reported benefit, whereas linguistic and organizational difficulties remained prominent. Exploratory analyses associated perceived pressure with posttest anxiety and a small increment in explained performance variance. NW-L2 showed the largest descriptive anxiety decrease, but the full-sample three-way interaction was not significant. These findings are hypothesis-generating. Under the conditions examined, brief EW provided no detectable incremental advantage over active NW in skill-specific anxiety or final-text performance.