An Investigation into Preparatory Class EFL Students’ L2 Writing Anxiety

Abstract

The current paper aims to investigate foreign language (L2) writing anxiety levels of Turkish EFL students with regard to their foreign language writing performance, gender, age and language level. The participants were 120 preparatory class students from A1, A2, and B1 levels at a state university in Turkey. The data were collected through an inventory, namely The Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory by Cheng (2004a), and midterm and final exam scores. According to the results of statistical procedures, it was found that 43.3% of the participants had high levels of foreign language writing anxiety while 34.2% of them had moderate and 22.5% of them had low anxiety levels. Additionally, the participants from A1 level had the highest level of writing anxiety (M=68.5). Furthermore, it was revealed that females had higher anxiety levels than males. The results from multiple regression analysis indicated that all variables together accounted for 23.3% of variance. Writing anxiety was significantly predicted by gender (β = -.33, p