Indonesian EFL Students’ Anxiety in Writing in English

Abstract

Writing is one of the language skills that is essential and must be mastered by the students. The students’ ability to express their ideas and information through writing is essential for their academic success (Hammann, 2005). The process of writing does not only involve students’ academic skills but also students’ psychology, such as anxiety. Spielberger, 1983 (as cited in Cubukcu, 2007), defined anxiety as an individual feeling of fear, tension, worry, and nervousness related to the arousal of the nervous system. The students who have anxiety in writing will find it difficult or incapable in expressing their ideas on writing. Cheng (2004) divided anxiety in writing into three categories, namely cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and avoidance anxiety. This study aimed in investigating the anxiety in writing in English of EFL students at tertiary level or education by finding the anxiety level and the dominant category. This study was conducted on students of English Education Study Program at Jember University by using a descriptive design. Identification of characteristics of a particular phenomenon is involved in descriptive research based on an observational basis (William, 2007). The researcher took about 15% of the population as the sample because the total population was more than 100 people (Arikunto, 2006). Thus, the participants of this study were 19 out of 117 students in the fifth semester of English Education Study Program in the academic year 2021/2022. In this study, the data was collected by using a close-ended questionnaire adopted from Cheng (2004) and it was a Likert-type questionnaire. It was distributed via WhatsApp in the form of an online a Likert-type questionnaire. It was distributed via WhatsApp in the form of an online questionnaire or Google Form to make it easier for participants to fill out the questionnaire due to the pandemic condition.The results showed that most of the students experienced anxiety in writing in English. The level of students’ anxiety in writing in English was at a moderate level. It was supported by the calculation result which revealed that the average percentage was 61.67% which categorized as a moderate level in the percentage category of anxiety level in writing. Furthermore, the result of the types of writing anxiety showed that cognitive anxiety had 481 total scores which the percentage was 37% and the mean score was 60, somatic anxiety had 412 total scores which the percentage was 32% and the mean score was 59, and avoidance anxiety had 396 total scores which the percentage was 31% and the mean score was 57. Thus, the highest percentage of the components was cognitive anxiety. It was the dominant type of the students’ anxiety in writing in English.