Writing Anxiety of Indonesian EFL Learners : Possible Causes and Coping Strategies

Abstract

In Indonesia, English is a foreign language, and it is also a compulsorysubject that must be taught to students atschools. As part of learning conductedregularly, in fact, students still face many issues while learning English. One ofthe issues that are also the focus of this study is writing anxiety. Writing anxiety isa feeling of anxietypresent when students will or are doing writing activities. Thiswriting anxiety has been shown to negatively affect students, both in the processand achievement of their work. In Indonesia itself, the exploration of this problemis rarely carried out by previous researchers. Refering to this, the present studywill further explore the causes of writing anxiety that occur to students and howthey cope with this writing anxiety.The present study employed a case study design to explore the causes of theIndonesianEFL learners' writing anxiety andhow they cope with this feeling bycollecting natural data from semi-structured interviews. The semi-structuredinterview was conducted directly with five participants, ninth-grade students atone of the state junior highschools located in theruralarea of Banyuwangi,especially those who had the most potential characteristics of experiencing writinganxiety. Then, analyzed the interview data according to the stages developed byBraun and Clarke (2006), which consisted of six stepsof phases.The findings of this study revealed that the causes of writing anxiety werevaried. I categorized those causes into several different themes. They are internalcausesrelated to psychological sources, external causesthat covered classroompractices and interpersonal threats, and linguistic causesabout the writing aspectsitself. In addition, I categorized their ways of coping with their writing anxiety xiinto one theme:strategies to copewithwritinganxiety.From the findings of thisstudy, it is suggested that teachers have sensitivity to the students' writing anxietyto take definite steps to cope with the writing anxiety attack.The teachers mustalso deviseflexible learning activityand motivational learning atmosphere tosuppress students' writing anxiety as little as possible. In addition, further researchis suggested to dig even deeper into the causes of writing anxiety by using asurvey method and involving the teachers' perspectives on the strategies to copewith writing anxiety.