The influence of dialogue journal writing in reducing EFL students' writing anxiety

Writing is considered important because it is one of the four English skills that take a significant role in the success of students’ language learning. However, it is undeniable that writing, especially for EFL college students, is still regarded difficult and frustrating (Graham, Harris, & Mason, 2005). As a result, students experience writing anxiety which affects the quality of their writing. This paper investigated factors that influenced students’ writing anxiety and how dialogue journal writing helped students reduce their writing anxiety. This study was based on qualitative research in which anxiety rubric from Ferris & Hedgcock (1998) and questionnaires were administered to gather the data. Besides, samples of journal entries were also used as data collections. The study concluded that there were three major factors influencing the students’ writing anxiety: (1) making grammatical mistakes, (2) having difficulty in finding ideas, and (3) making minimum requirement mistakes. The study also revealed 5 specific ways on how dialogue journal helped the students reduce their writing anxiety: (1) Learning grammatically correct sentences, (2) creating a writing habit, (3) providing good examples on how to develop ideas, (4) Learning minimum requirement, and (5) facilitating student-teacher relation