Writing anxiety among Indonesian EFL students: Factors and strategies

Abstract

Writing anxiety is a term for a wide variety of apprehensive and pessimistic feelings about writing. The purpose of this study is to identify factors contributing to writing anxiety experienced by EFL students in writing essays and the strategies they apply to manage it. The possible factors of the anxiety were elaborated into close-ended questionnaire items that were distributed to the sampled students followed by open-ended questionnaire item on strategies to deal with the anxiety. The findings indicate that from several potentially anxiety producing factors of essay writing, essay assignment that must be done in the class is the most dominant factor of writing anxiety experienced by the students. Collaborative works in pairs or small groups for idea development and essay construction are the common strategies adopted to minimize the anxiety. The findings imply that when students are given the opportunity to use the preferred strategies, their writing anxiety can be manageable.