A Study Of Master Students’Academic Writing Anxiety And Writing Strategies For Self-regulated Learning

English academic writing plays an increasingly crucial role in academic research.More and more Chinese universities have put forward higher requirements of English academic writing for postgraduates with the acceleration of world-class college and discipline construction.Some key universities in China have listed the publication of academic papers as one of the criteria for evaluating the comprehensive quality of postgraduates.However,due to the differences between Chinese and English,L2 writers’English competence and characteristics of the style itself,English academic writing has brought many difficulties and challenges for L2 postgraduates,especially for master students,who have little academic writing experience as novice researchers.Writing anxiety,as a negative affective factor,has debilitating effects on learners’ writing achievement,especially for L2 learners.While most studies have investigated the ways of alleviating writing anxiety from the perspective of external factors,few studies explored how L2 learners mitigated writing anxiety actively and improved their writing quality through their own efforts,namely their writing strategies for self-regulated learning(SRL).Therefore,this study explored the situation of master students’ academic writing anxiety and analyzed their attitudes towards writing strategies for SRL and their deployment of diverse cognitive,metacognitive,social and cultural resources.The present study recruited 253 Chinese master students from six Chinese key universities as research participants,and adopted a mixed research design,in which one questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to address three research questions.The first research question was about the overall features of academic writing anxiety and the employment of writing strategies for SRL of master students majoring in English in Chinese mainland.The second one investigated the differences in the use of writing strategies for SRL among master students with different anxiety levels.The third one focused on the correlation between Chinese master students’ academic writing anxiety and writing strategies for SRL.According to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data,three research questions were answered and several findings were revealed.First,academic writing anxiety was common among the participants and a majority of them experienced a high level of writing anxiety,including cognitive anxiety,somatic anxiety and avoidance behavior.Second,master students’ overall use of writing strategies for SRL,including cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies,social behavior strategies and motivational regulation strategies,were at a relatively low to medium level.Third,there were significant differences in the use of writing strategies for SRL among the low-level,mid-level and high-level anxiety groups.With regard to the sub-categories,cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies,social behavior strategies and motivational regulation strategies,there were also significant differences in the use of the four specific strategies among the three anxiety groups.Fourth,academic writing anxiety of these master students was negatively correlated with their employment of writing strategies for self-regulated learning with a medium effect size.Moreover,small to middle effect sizes were found for the correlations between the four sub-categories of writing strategies for SRL and L2 academic writing anxiety.The present study has some theoretical and practical implications for the research of L2 academic writing.It revealed the situation of Chinese master students’ academic writing anxiety and their use of writing strategies for SRL and enriched the existing research on the correlation between academic writing anxiety with writing strategies for SRL theoretically.The study offered feasible suggestions for colleges and teachers,especially master students’supervisors,to pay attention to master students’ writing anxiety and for master students to alleviate their writing anxiety and make their academic writing processes easier and more enjoyable through the employment of writing strategies for SRL.