Abstract:

Anxiety studies have gained much interest in recent years with the advent of the significance of the impact of affective factors to the fore on foreign language learning process, which deal with “the emotional reactions and motivations of thelearner” (Scovel, 1978:16). Psychological and complicated in nature, anxiety isassociated with such negative feelings as fear, apprehension and worry. A greatbody of research has been devoted to examine the role of anxiety on specific language skills, especially speaking and listening. However, defined as “fear of thewriting process that outweighs the projected gain from the ability to write”(Thompson, 1980:121), writing anxiety deserves a closer look since prevalence ofwriting anxiety in foreign language classes affecting the L2 performance andachievement in a negative way has been acknowledged in many studies. Hence, theaim of the present study is twofold: to determine the extent of writing anxiety experienced by 63 prep-class students at English Language Teacher Training (ELT)department with a specific reference to the role of gender and the type of highschool they graduated from, and unravel the underlying causes. With conveniencesampling of the participants, data were collected through Second Language WritingAnxiety Inventory (SLWAI) (Cheng, 2004), Second Language Writing AnxietyReasons Scale (SLWARS) (Kara, 2013) and semi-structured interviews. The studyrevealed that majority of the ELT students experience high or average level of writing anxiety towards writing tasks in general, the participant-related variableslike gender and the type of high school has no significant effect on the students’total writing anxiety scores, and various reasons, except from the teachers’ pedagogical practices and feedback preferences, have a role to play in students’feeling anxious when they are asked to write in L2

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