Pre-service EFL teachers’ foreign language writing anxiety: some associated factors

Anxiety studies have gained much interest in recent years with the advent of the significance of the impact of affective factors to the fore on foreign language learning process, which deal with "the emotional reactions and motivations of the learner" (Scovel, 1978:16).Psychological and complicated in nature, anxiety is associated with such negative feelings as fear, apprehension and worry.A great body of research has been devoted to examine the role of anxiety on specific language skills, especially speaking and listening.However, defined as "fear of the writing process that outweighs the projected gain from the ability to write" (Thompson, 1980:121), writing anxiety deserves a closer look since prevalence of writing anxiety in foreign language classes affecting the L2 performance and achievement in a negative way has been acknowledged in many studies.Hence, the aim of the present study is twofold: to determine the extent of writing anxiety experienced by 63 prep-class students at English Language Teacher Training (ELT) department with a specific reference to the role of gender and the type of high school they graduated from, and unravel the underlying causes.With convenience sampling of the participants, data were collected through Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) (Cheng, 2004), Second Language Writing Anxiety Reasons Scale (SLWARS) (Kara, 2013) and semi-structured interviews.The study revealed that majority of the ELT students experience high or average level of writing anxiety towards writing tasks in general, the participant-related variables like gender and the type of high school has no significant effect on the students' total writing anxiety scores, and various reasons, except from the teachers' pedagogical practices and feedback preferences, have a role to play in students' feeling anxious when they are asked to write in L2.