Analyzing Writing Anxiety Level of Turkish Cypriot Students

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the writing anxiety of Turkish Cypriot students at the secondary education level. The level of writing anxiety of students were analysed in three different dimensions. These are “the student’s own characteristics and behaviours”, “the influence of family” and “the influence of the overall educational process, teacher and school”. In this study, 721 secondary school (Class 6, 7, 8) students from Nicosia in Northern Cyprus completed the Writing Apprehension Test: 390 female and 330 male students within the age range of 11 to16 (Mean= 12.84, sd= 1.05). According to the Rasch analysis, the new version of Daly and Miller’s (1975) WAT (3 point Likert scale) which has 20 items (10 positive and 10 negative items) and one factor was used in this study. The writing anxiety of students was examined in three basic headings (own characteristics and behaviours, family characteristics and the impact of school and teachers). Six variables were selected as baseline related to the characteristics and behaviours of students, and all of these determined variables (gender, reading frequency, keeping diary, poem writing, story writing and self-perception of own writing success) were found to be significant for writing anxiety levels. On the other hand, only one of the five variables among family impact (the frequency of newspaper purchase at home) and two of the six variables among school-teacher impact (receiving pre-school education and total working hours of Turkish language teacher) were found to be effective. Considering the results of the present study that anxiety levels of the students who read books, keep diaries or write stories, essays and poems are lower than that of the ones who do not, students should be motivated to perform these activities out of school hours.