A Study Of College Students’ English Writing Strategies Based On The English Learning Anxiety

Since the1970s, the center of second language acquisition’s researches has beentransferred from“how to teach”to“how to learn”.Therefore, there are an increasingnumber of researches on the learning strategies. Writing is a basic language learningcompetence that language learners should master. However, for language learners, it’snot easy even difficult to write. In order to improve the writing ability of languagelearners, the recent years has also witnessed the increase of the investigations of thewriting strategies. Meanwhile, the focus of researches of the language learners hasbeen shifted from the external factors to the internal factors so that the affectivefactors became the hot concern of the second language acquisition. According toKrashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, learners’ SLA is related to the learners’ attitudewhich is prone to be affected by the effective factors which is represented by anxiety.Based on the previous studies, the learning anxiety exerts a negative impact on theuses of the learning strategies. Thereby, considering the influence of learning anxiety,this study mainly intend to investigate the general situation of the college students’writing strategies uses and explore the relationship between the writing strategies usesand the English learning anxiety as well as their influence on the writing performance.On the basis of the literature review of the learning strategies, writing strategies andlearning anxiety, the study utilized quantitative method to accomplish the research.The researchers took advantage of the questionnaires and a writing test to collect theraw data and adopted descriptive statistics and SPSS to analyze the final data. The164subjects are all from non-English major sophomores in Xi’an Polytechnic Universityincluding114male students and50female students.The following questions were investigated in the study:1).What is the general situation of writing strategies employment of Chinese college students? Is there anydifference between the two genders?2).What is the relationship between theemployment of writing strategies and writing performance? Is there any differencebetween the successful writers and the less successful writers?3).What is the presentsituation of English learning anxiety of Chinese college students? What’s therelationship between ELA and writing performance?4).What is the relationshipbetween the English learning anxiety and writing strategies of the college students aswell as their effects on the writing performance? Is there any difference in the choiceof language strategies among different levels of anxiety?According to the data analysis, some major findings are revealed:1）The non-English major college students did adopt writing strategies in theirwriting process even though the whole degree merely belongs to the medium level.And they preferred to use more compensation strategies and cognitive strategies andless metacognitive strategies and affective strategies. Besides, female utilized morewriting strategies than males.2) Positive correlations are found between the sixcategoriesz writing strategies and writing performance both generally and respectivelyto a diverse extent. Metacognitive strategies manifest the highest correlations with thewriting performance. Moreover, the influence of affective strategies cannot beneglected. The successful writers adopt more writing strategies than less successfulwriters, especially in metacognitive strategies and memory strategies.3) It is acommon phenomenon that non-English major college students regularly suffer fromthe English learning anxiety and there is a negative relation between the learninganxiety and writing performance.4) The English learning anxiety exerts some impactson the employment of writing strategies so as to influence the writing performanceeventually. The higher level of ELA is, the less writing strategies are used.To sum up, the researcher intends to assist the college teachers to understand andenhance the importance of the writing strategies and situation of the students’ learninganxiety through the research. Teachers could make the best use of some teachingmethods and strengthen the writing strategies training to build up students’self-confidence and alleviate the negative influence of the learning anxiety so as toimprove students’ learning performance.