Chapters authored
An Investigation of Foreign Language Writing Anxiety Inside Vs. Outside Classroom among Arabic-Speaking Learners of English in Saudi Arabia
Empirical evidence suggests that anxiety is considered an obstacle that hinders the process of foreign language development, including writing anxiety. This research attempts to investigate the levels of English Foreign Language (EFL) writing anxiety inside- vs. outside-classroom contexts among Arabic-speaking learners of English and to determine the anxiety-provoking factors in these contexts and the potential remedies for them. A total of 15 female Arabic-English majors students at Taif University in Saudi Arabia were interviewed in the study. The findings suggest that the participants suffer from high levels of writing anxiety in the classroom context, whilst they experienced low levels of anxiety in the outside-classroom context. This may have originated from the fact that the in-classroom context entails severe anxiety-provoking factors such as fear of judgements from others, time constraint, unfamiliar topics, striving for perfection, inadequate practice, former painful experience, lack of supporting resources and so on. The participants account for the low levels of anxiety when writing in the outside-classroom context that the aforementioned triggers do not exist or that some of them hardly occur when writing online, for instance. Besides, the outside-classroom context permits stress-free methods such as accessing supporting resources online. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications.
Part of the book: Psycholinguistics