A Correlational Study Of Anxiety In English Classroom Writing And Writing Performance Of Middle School Students In Guangzhou

Students who take part in all kinds of school activities experience different degrees of anxiety. The role of anxiety in learning, therefore, is a heated topic in the studies of educational psychology and second language acquisition both at home and abroad. Based on the Yerkes-Dodson Law and the Trait-State Anxiety Theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between anxiety in English classroom writing and writing performance of middle school students in Guangzhou.The research questions of the present study are:1) How does anxiety correlate with writing performance? 2) Is there any difference between students of the outstanding class and those of the poor class in the correlational study?The research including 76 subjects from Guangzhou Yuexiu Foreign Language School adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches:questionnaire, writing tasks, writing tests, interviews and ordering anxiety in different writing situations. The data collected in this study are mainly analyzed by T-test, Bivariate Correlaitons and by comparing students' mean level of anxiety in different writing situations.The overall result of the study shows that the relationship between anxiety and writing performance is not significant. Nevertheless, the relationship between students' anxiety and writing test performance is found to be negative and significant in the outstanding class. Besides, the possible factors that may affect the relationship between anxiety and writing performance such as time constraint and writing topic, seem to have little impact in this study. In addition, because of the differences of the students' perception of anxiety and the difficultness of the writing, in teaching English writing, students' anxiety can be treated accordingly. Finally, suggestions are offered to enrich the picture of the relationship between anxiety and writing performance in the future study.