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Chapter One Introduction

1.1  Research background and research questions

It has been proved in many researches that the influence of learners' affective state is one ofthe vital factors affecting the effect of learners'second language learning. The affectivefactors influencing language learning can be divided into two classes. The first class relatesto learner's personal factors including anxiety, inhibition, self-esteem, motivation and so on;the second class deals with the affective factors between learners or between learners andteachers consisting of empathy, classroom transactions, etc.(Xiang Maoying, 2003). Amongthese factors, anxiety is the principal factor impeding learning language effectively (Oxford,1999). Spielberger. C (1983 ) defines anxiety as “an unpleasant emotional state or conditionwhich is characterized by subjective feelings of tension, anxiety and worry, and by activationor arousal of the automatic nervous system.” In recent years, a lot of researches have beendone at home and abroad on the role of anxiety in FL learning to find out the correlationbetween FL anxiety and various aspects of language achievement including course grade,speaking, writing, listening and reading achievements.Writing is an emotional as well as cognitive activity, that is, it involves what we thinkand feel while we are writing (Cheng，2002). According to Grabe and Kaplan (1996), it hasbeen quite customary to think of writing as not being an innate skill or potential capacity oraptitude; but as a developmental capacity that can be nurtured in similar ways as othercognitive and psychomotor skills are developed. Therefore, affective factors play a vital partin the process of writing in which writing anxiety is the most important factor. Daly andMiller (1975) firstly proposed the term “writing anxiety" as ‘‘a situation and subject-specificindividual difference that is concerned with a person's general tendency to approach or avoidwriting accompanied by some amount of evaluation". Daly, J, A. (1978) claimed that"individuals with low anxiety of writing would perform significantly better than those withhigh anxiety on a test of writing skills". Highly apprehensive writers find writingunrewarding, even punishing. Consequently, they avoid, whenever possible, those situationsthat require writing (Daly& Miller, 1975). Daly and his colleagues have conducted manyresearches on first language (LI) writing anxiety by using a standardized self-reporting toolnamed WAT (Writing Anxiety Test) to measure writing anxiety. However, foreign languagewriters are often assumed to experience anxiety more frequently than first language writersand are more inclined to have negative attitude towards foreign language writing (Krashen,1982). So studying on the influence of foreign writing anxiety on foreign language writingcan be very important for understanding and improving FL learning in the classroom.Writing Performance is commonly measured by holistic scoring which is based on thefactors of ideas, organization, style, vocabulary，and sentence structure (Homburg，1984 &Kawata，1992& Vann, 1979), At the same time, Lester Faigley& John A. Daly& Stephen P.Witte (1981) measured aspects of writing performance in the study not only from the overallrating of writing but also from three internal characteristics of writing, that is words perT-unit (W/T), words per clause (W/C), and the f本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。