The Types of Anxiety
20 people are better at learning easy material and poorer at learning more difficult
material Weitzner, 1965 in McClelland, 1985. EFL students tend to learn more difficult material since they learn English as their foreign language and they
absolutely experienced anxiety. In this research, the anxious feeling which will be discussed is writing anxiety.
Writing anxiety is defined as “a general avoidance of writing behaviour and of situations thought to potentially require some amount of writing
accompanied by the potential for evaluation of that writing Hasan, 2001, p.4. as cited in Iswandari, 2013.
The students who experienced writing anxiety tend to try avoid to write because some certain situations. Psychologically, learners who are oriented to
avoiding negative judgements of their competence are more anxious about test and their performance Linnenbrink, 2005. Negative judgements can be one of
the factors which caused writing anxiety. The students become insecure in writing. As McClelland stated that there is some evidence of what more anxious
people seek is some kind of security 1985, p. 376. Besides, “writing anxiety can
be detrimental to your writing abilities. It can make you put off completing your work, which can lead to you not writing as well as you could
” Missisipi University,2010.
In addition, writing anxiety could affect students’ writing product. Further, they need to be guided and trained to write to get the evaluation
of their writing “Therefore, the notion of success in writing is associated with self-
expression, flow of ideas, outsider expectations, growing confidence and enjoyment of L2 academic writing, and L2 students are known to have
problems coping with this ” Basturkmen and Lewis, 2002 as cited in
Daud, 2005.
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From the statement above, writing anxiety is related to anxious feeling of self-expression, flow ideas, growing confidence and enjoyment in writing.
Students who have problems with them mostly experience writing anxiety. Since EFL students come from one different culture and language background, they
experience writing anxiety more.