The Relationship between Secondary School Students’ Writing Attitudes and Anxiety and Writing Disposition

Literacy is an important result of language teaching. Language skills are like the pieces of a whole. The accurate acquisition of these skills, which are needed to be used effectively by individuals both in their social and educational life, is equally valuable. Writing is a skill that is acquired and developed mostly during the learning process among these skills. Writing requires not only recognizing the letters and language rules but also understanding and internalizing oneself and the environment. Therefore, emotions, opinions and experiences regarding this skill should be emphasized. The aim of this study is to review the relationship between secondary school students’ writing attitudes and anxieties, and writing dispositions. The study group of the study included secondary school students who were randomly selected in the center of Kars, Turkey in the 2019-2020 academic year. Data were collected using “the Attitude Scale towards Writing for Secondary School Students”, “the Writing Disposition Scale”, and “the Writing Anxiety Scale for secondary school Students”. The results showed that secondary school students’ writing attitudes, dispositions and anxieties did not produce a significant difference based on the variable of gender.

Common Writing Problems and Writing Attitudes among Freshman University Students in Online Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study

This paper is an exploratory study on college freshmen’s writing problems in relation to their attitudes towards writing in online learning environments. The writing problems that were explored were the following, as identified by Yates and Kenkel (2002): a) Surface writing problems and b) Global writing problems. The problems were found in the essays of the participants. In conjunction with the writing problems that were identified, attitudes towards checking and revising one’s work, towards writing, and towards receiving feedback on one’s writing were also identified through the writing attitude scale adopted from Erkan and Saban (2011) and was re-worded to suit the Philippine college context. The results of the study revealed that the majority of the writing problems were surface problems, particularly those related to verbs, nouns, and prepositions. As for writing attitudes, the participants of the study generally manifested positive attitudes towards writing.

The Effect of Using Mind Maps to Enhance EFL Learners' Writing Achievement and Students' Attitudes Towards Writing at Taif University

Writing in general, second language writing in particular, can be an obstacle for some students. The reason why writing can be hard to learn is that writers face many challenges the moment they start writing. The challenges could be from gathering the ideas to be written, planning of the outline, focusing on sentence structure, choosing the appropriate expressions, and also making sure of the organization. Moreover, these challenges can cause students to have negative attitudes towards writing. Previous studies suggest that using writing strategies can help student control the writing process which have a positive effect on their writing achievement and their attitudes towards writing. The strategy of mind mapping is used as a pre-writing strategy to help writers visualize the structure of their writing. However, the researcher proposes using mind mapping strategy not only to organize ideas, but also to organize grammatical and linguistic knowledge. This study investigates the effect of using this mind mapping strategy as a pre-writing strategy to enhance female language learners’ writing achievement and their attitudes towards writing in English at Taif University, Saudi Arabia. In a quasi-experimental design, a mixed methods approach was adopted by collecting quantitative and qualitative data. The study population is 128 students in an experimental group (n1= 57) and a control group (n2=71). The former received the treatment of instruction using mind mapping strategy and the latter received traditional instruction. The objectives of this study are first, to identify any differences between the mean scores of the experimental group and the control group on post-tests of writing attitudes and writing achievement; second, to identify differences between the mean scores of the pre- and post-tests of writing attitudes and writing achievement for the experimental group; third, to explore students' views concerning difficulties to write in English. fourth, to identify the strategies they used to overcome these difficulties; fifth, to investigate if students thought that mind mapping helped them write better and, if so, how. The researcher prepared a test to measure the writing achievement of female first-year EFL students, and a questionnaire by Sturm (1996) to measure writing attitudes. An interview was conducted with a focus group from the experimental group to achieve the third, fourth and fifth objectives. Independent samples and paired sample t-tests were performed to quantitively analyze data from the writing achievement test and the writing attitudes questionnaire. Data collected from the interview were qualitatively analyzed. The finding of the current study are first, there exists differences between the mean scores of the experimental and the control group on the post-tests of the students` writing achievement and writing attitudes, in favor of the experimental group; second there exists significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental group’s pre- and post-tests in writing achievement and writing attitudes, in favor of the post-test; third, students’ difficulties to write in English include lack of vocabulary, organization, spelling and grammar; fourth, students are accustomed to memorizing, practicing, and self-correcting, which indicates they are not used to planning their writing; finally, students also positively perceived the strategy of mind mapping and thought it helped them to better write in English.