The effect of using WhatsApp in online learning setting on Indonesian EFL students’ writing apprehension and the relation with their writing achievement

Abstract

The primary goals of this research are to investigate the students’ writing apprehension level after being taught through WhatsApp in online learning setting and to find out the correlation between writing apprehension and writing achievement. This study was carried out quantitatively and involved one class of grade X which consisted of thirty-five students. The data was collected through English Writing Test and Writing Apprehension Test, a questionnaire that was developed by Daly and Miller (1975). To test the hypotheses, paired sample t-test and Pearson correlation analysis were applied. The finding of paired sample t-test revealed that there was a significant reduction in the students’ writing apprehension level after the implementation of WhatsApp in online writing classes. Meanwhile, for the correlational analysis, it was done three times to obtain more specific results; the correlation of the data before the treatment, the correlation of the data after the treatment, and the correlation of gain scores of the data. The results showed respectively that two correlational analyses had very high correlation and the last one had an average correlation. Furthermore, all findings showed significant negative correlation; meaning that there was a significant inverse relationship between writing apprehension and writing achievement. This implied that the lower the level of writing apprehension is, the higher the score of writing achievement would be. In conclusion, the implementation of WhatsApp in online writing class is effective to improve students' writing achievement and effective to reduce students’ writing apprehension in Indonesian EFL students.