Developing a Writing Anxiety Scale and Examining Writing Anxiety Based on Various Variables

Abstract

There are two main aims of this research. The primary aim is to develop a reliable and valid anxiety scale to determine writing anxiety levels of prospective teachers. The secondary aim is to determine what variables explain anxiety levels of students to what extent, by determining whether writing anxiety levels of prospective teachers significantly varied in terms of various variables. The study consisted of 202 junior students from Departments of Classroom Teaching, Elementary School Mathematics Teaching and Turkish Language Teaching at a Turkish university in the spring term of 2008-2009 academic year. The data were collected using Writing Anxiety Scale which was developed by the authors to measure writing anxiety levels of students and personal forms to describe personal traits of the students. The data were analyzed by SPSS 13.00 and LISREL 8.70 package programs. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis, it was found out that there was a single dimension. Besides, 49% of the total variance in the 35-item-scale was measuring was explained by the scale items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to confirm the construct obtained by exploratory factor analysis. There were not statistically significant correlations between writing anxiety levels of university students and gender and educational background of parents. As a result of stepwise regression analysis, used to determine the predictive variables of writing anxiety levels in terms of personal traits, it was seen that out-of-school writing practice, in-class writing activities by 1-8 grade teachers, amount of time spent watching television, and gender were significant predictive variables and those variables explained only 9.5% of writing anxiety