Exploring Writing Anxiety and Self-Efficacy among EFL Graduate Students in Taiwan

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.

The relationship between writing anxiety, writing selfefficacy, and Spanish EFL students’ use of metacognitive writing strategies: a case study

“…The confidence in self-regulatory strategies, the self-regulation of cognitive development, the long-term and intermediate-term goal setting, and the determination in spite of difficulties are characteristics shared by self-believers, which suggest that self-efficacy is an emotional construct closely related with metacognition (Jones 2008;Williams and Takaku 2011). Concerning writing selfefficacy, the literature reports a positive correlation between such factor and a positive writing performance (Pajares and Valiante 2006;Jones 2008;Prat-Sala and Redford 2012;Stewart et al 2015;Ho 2016). In fact, recent research has found that writing self-efficacy is a more significant predictor of a good writing performance than writing anxiety itself (Woodrow 2011;Sander-Reio et al 2014).…”

“…al. 2014;Ho 2016). Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, very little research has been done concerning writing anxiety in secondary school EFL students.…”

“…These two issues have been commonly studied in isolation, but there is also research on the connection between emotional constructs and the final written outcome (Karakaya and Ülper 2011;Jebreil et al 2014;Kirmizi and Kirmizi 2015;Liu and Ni 2015;Ho 2016).…”

“…The composing process of a written text is one of the most 'Neil and Abedi 1996;Cheng 2004;Jones 2008;Stewart et al 2015;Ho 2016) Palabras clave: Escritura, educación secundaria, estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera, metacognición, ansiedad, autoeficacia. …”

Debatable Issues of English Writing Apprehensions: A Qualitative Study of Taiwanese English Majors’ Perspectives

“…Most studies agree with that the learning apprehensions cause students feel frustrating and becoming weaker in learning process. (Krashen, 2016, Tomlinson, 1981) Students tend to feel be demotivated in writing can hold negative attitude toward their writing tasks, producing papers of low quality, have negative impressions of their own writing and are more likely to avoid situations where writing is required (Ho, 2016;Sanders-Reio, et al, 2014). Hence, promoting learners' affirmative attitudes for learning has become a fundamental key to an effective and successful writing course.…”