A STUDY ON WRITING ANXIETY OF FIFTH-SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT AT UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG

Anxiety is an issue happen almost in every foreign language learning situation. As one of four English skills, writing is found to be a difficult learning activity especially for foreign language learners as in writing activity, the students are demanded to write their opinion in another language with its language rules such as grammar and construction of a paragraph. This kind of situation may cause writing anxiety of the students. This study aim to find out: (1) type of writing anxiety of the fifth-semester students, (2) the factors that result writing anxiety, and (3) the strategy in reducing writing anxiety used by fifth-semester students of English Language Education Department at University of Muhammadiyah Malang. To answer the research problems, mixed method was used in this study. A total of 128 students from 9 Writing III classes participated in this study and 36 students were selected randomly as the sample. The data was collected through questionnaires and interview. The questionnaires were Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) and Cause of Writing Anxiety Inventory (CWAI) were analyzed quantitatively and the data obtained through interview was analyzed qualitatively. The data showed that 47% of the students perceived cognitive anxiety which made it as common type of writing anxiety of the fifth-semester students. Moreover, the anxiety provoking factors that cause writing anxiety were linguistic difficulties, time constraint, insufficient writing practice and high frequency of writing assignments. The study also found the strategy used by the students in reducing their writing anxiety such as praying, practice, getting self-confidence and making outline while taking writing test