EFL college students writing anxiety of English language education at Universitas Internasional Batam

Theodesia Lady Pratiwi

doi:10.15294/elt.v10i2.42908

Abstract

Writing is considered to be the most difficult skill to master for EFL students. This experience was faced by English Language Education (ELE) students at Universitas Internasional Batam (UIB). Based on the observation, the results of their writings were not satisfying. This study assumed that the students might feel anxious when they were writing in English. Therefore, this study aims to examine the types and causes of writing anxiety of ELE students at UIB. This study employed explanatory design of mixed method research. The research instruments were questionnaires adopted from SLWAI and CWAI developed by Cheng (2004). To extend the deeper analysis, this study conducted interviews to the high- and low-level writing anxiety students. This study found that the most dominant levels of writing anxiety is high-anxiety (71.43%). In terms of writing anxiety, this study found that cognitive anxiety is the most dominant type with the mean of 26.37. Next, when studying the cause of writing anxiety, the most dominant cause was linguistic difficulties. This result was in line with the interviews with high-and low- writing anxiety students. Students with both high and low writing anxiety still found that linguistic difficulties affect their writing anxiety. Therefore, the learning process at English Language Education needs to be equipped with sufficient linguistic competences in the first year, such as vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation.

Highlights

English as a lingua franca has generally four skills, namely listening, reading, speaking, and writing
This study interviewed the students according to the level of the writing anxiety, namely high writing anxiety, moderate writing anxiety, and low writing anxiety
Level of writing anxiety Firstly, this study found out the level of students’ writing anxiety into low, moderate, and high anxiety

Summary

Introduction

English as a lingua franca has generally four skills, namely listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Listening and reading skill are receptive skills, speaking and writing is a productive skill. When it comes to productive skills, students will have to face some difficulties. Talking about writing skill, writing is considered demanding, especially for EFL (English as Foreign Language) and ESL (English as Second Language) learners (Daud et al, 2007). It is demanding since English is not their first language. The difficulties lead to students’ anxiety to apply the writing skill

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion