THE STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE WRITING ANXIETY AMONG ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, JEMBER UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Writing in foreign language in this regard, English, is an important language skill to acquire the importance of communication in this globalization era. It cannot be denied that writing in English for almost every foreign language learners is believed as a tough case. In terms of Indonesian learners, especially students of English department of Faculty of Letters, Jember University, they are still nervous and reluctant to write in English. Whereas, everyday they are dealing with English since the first semester of their study. If the reality shows such a phenomenon, it means the students experience writing anxiety. “Writing anxiety refers to a situation and subject specific individual difference associated with a person’s tendencies to approach or avoid situations perceived to potentially require writing accompanied by some amount of perceived evaluation” (Daly and Wilson (1983:327). Writing anxiety plays a contributive role in giving negative influence for writing progress as well as writing achievement of students. There is a close relationship between the levels of writing anxiety toward students’ performance. Horwitz (2001) found that language anxiety is negatively related to students’ achievement. Besides having a close relationship with performance and achievement, anxiety also has a reciprocal correlation with situational variable. Situational variable according to William and Andrade (2008) includes language level. The variation of level of anxiety on the students can be caused by the language level. The writer is interested to examine writing anxiety which occurs among English Department Students of Faculty of Letters, Jember University. Through mixed method strategy, the writer is going to figure out the most dominant type of writing anxiety based the language level of the students, the main factors of writing anxiety based on the language level of the students and the relationship of writing anxiety levels to the students’ achievement. The data on this study are derived by applying two closed-ended questionnaires, Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (Cheng, 2004) and Causes of Writing Anxiety Inventory (Rezaei & Jafari, 2014), semi-structured interview and students’ writing final scores. The participants are 44 students, 24 students are semester three and 20 students are semester one. For the purpose of interview, 3 students are selected to represent low anxiety, moderate anxiety and high anxiety. The results show that Cognitive anxiety is recorded as the most dominant type for both semester one and semester three students. It means the determination of writing anxiety dominant type is not affected by the language level of the students. In other hand, the dissimilarity because of the language level happens to the main factors of writing anxiety. Semester three students record insufficient writing practice, language difficulties and insufficient writing technique as their main factors for writing anxiety. Whereas language difficulties, time pressure and insufficient writing practice come as the three main sources of writing anxiety of first semester students. The last research question shows the finding that the three levels of anxiety (high, moderate and low) somehow affect students’ achievement. Students who can take advantage of their levels anxiety, they will be able to alter anxiety into something profitable for them when they are learning a language. However, if the students cannot utilize their anxiety, as the level of anxiety getting higher, the worse grade they will obtain.All in all, anxiety does not only contribute bad influence, but it also gives positive effect. The existence ofnegative or positive effect of anxiety depends on the action of students toward it.