A Correlative Study On The Students' English Writing Anxiety And The Use Of Writing Strategies In Senior High School

Writing is both a cognitive activity and a special emotional activity.Writing is an important part of English teaching in senior high school,but it is also a difficult task.How to cultivate students' interest in writing and to improve their English writing ability have become an important issue for researchers and the majority of senior high school English teachers.Based on the background,the author,from the emotional perspective,conducts the correlative study on the senior high school students English writing anxiety and writing strategy use,aiming to provide valuable suggestions for improving the teaching of English writing in senior high school.The study,based on the affective filter hypothesis and Ellis' second language acquisition model,adopts the quantitative and qualitative method and takes 309 students randomly selected from three grades of a key senior high school in Huaibei as subjects.At first,a questionnaire survey is carried out to collect data,which is analysed by means of SPSS19.0.Through the descriptive analysis,Pearson correlation analysis and Independent-samples T test,the study intends to explore senior high school students' English writing anxiety level,their writing strategy use and the correlation between them.In addition,12 students randomly selected from the high and low English writing anxiety groups are interviewed to further support the quantitative analysis results.The questions designed in this study are:(1)What is the level of senior high school students' English writing anxiety?(2)What is the frequency level of English writing strategy used by senior high school students?(3)Does there exist a correlation between senior high school students' English writing anxiety and writing strategy use?If there exists a correlation,which kind correlation is it?The study reveals that:(1)Senior high school students experience moderate degree of English writing anxiety on the whole.Among four English writing anxiety dimensions,avoidance behavior ranks the first,followed by confidence apprehension,conceiving anxiety and classroom teaching anxiety.What's more,avoidance behavior is of high level of anxiety.(2)The overall frequency of English writing strategy used by senior high school students is at the medium level.Among all six writing strategy categories,linguistic strategy ranks the first,followed by conception and organization strategy,compensation strategy,dictionary strategy,resource management strategy and social/affective strategy.(3)There exists a significant negative correlation between senior high school students' English writing anxiety and writing strategy use on the whole.There also exist negative correlations among different dimensions of English writing anxiety and writing strategy.Based on the above results,this study provides some suggestions for relieving students English writing anxiety and strengthening writing strategy training.These suggestions include increasing students' interest in English writing,enhancing students' confidence in English writing,strengthening pre-writing conception training,altering writing revising mode,strengthening resource management strategy and social/affective strategy training.However,there are still some shortcomings in the study,such as the limited quantity of research samples and the narrow survey scope.