Abstract
This study investigates research writing anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs among English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) graduate students in engineering-related fields. The relationship between the two writing affective constructs was examined and students’ perspectives on research writing anxiety were also explored. A total of 218 survey responses from engineering graduate students at Taiwanese universities were analyzed, along with qualitative data from open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews. The findings show that while master’s and doctoral students felt a similar moderate level of writing anxiety, senior doctoral students were more self-efficacious about writing research papers in English than their junior counterparts. Overall, students with higher writing self-efficacy felt less apprehensive. Additionally, among the individual variables, experience in writing for publication better predicted writing anxiety and self-efficacy than students’ self-reported English proficiency and the number of writing courses taken. The qualitative findings indicated various sources of graduate-level writing anxiety, including insufficient writing skills in English, time constraints, and fear of negative comments. Furthermore, composing different sections of a research paper provoked different levels of anxiety due to the variations in the rhetorical purposes and discourse structures of particular sections. Implications on dealing with research writing anxiety are also discussed.
Highlights
Graduate-level writing practices across disciplines have gained increasing scholarly attention in recent years
The results indicated that significant differences existed among the three research writing anxiety subscales, F(1.78, 386.79) = 58.86, p =
Writing self-efficacy is only one of the four subscales in Phillip and Russell’s (1994) research self-efficacy inventory, their results suggest that the advanced graduate students who were in their fourth year or beyond might have more experience in conducting research and writing journal papers and felt more self-efficacious than beginning graduate students. These results indirectly suggest that a lack of academic writing experience and/or unfamiliarity with composing discipline-specific academic papers play a significant role in the increase of research writing anxiety and the decrease of writing self-efficacy
Summary
Graduate-level writing practices across disciplines have gained increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Most previous studies into writing anxiety and self-efficacy focused on native English speaking students and ESL/EFL learners at secondary or university levels. Little research has examined the influences of graduate-level writing anxiety and self-efficacy as students undertake discipline-specific writing tasks (Lavelle & Bushrow, 2007). Given the dearth of research on graduate-level writing affective variables in both L1 and L2 settings, this study aims to investigate writing anxiety and self-efficacy among EFL graduate students in Taiwan. The levels and sources of Taiwanese engineering graduate students’ research writing anxiety are explored. Adopting a multi-dimensional measure of self-efficacy, this study investigates students’ self-efficacy beliefs concerning different research writing skills
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