Contributions of foreign language writing emotions to writing achievement

Task complexity and foreign language writing emotions as predictors of EFL writing performance

“…For task complexity and writing anxiety interaction on the dimensions of language fluency, language complexity, and language accuracy, we have found that English major students in China with low writing anxiety can lead more production of language fluency, language complexity, and language accuracy than any other subgroups in the current study, and these findings once further confirmed the essential effects of writing anxiety and task difficulty on EFL writing achievement, which has also been evidenced by the prior studies, for example, for the effect of task complexity on language achievement (see Kuiken and Vedder, 2008;Ong and Zhang, 2010), and for the effect of writing anxiety on language achievement (see Cheng, 2004;Rahimi and Zhang, 2019;Tahmouresi and Papi, 2021;Li et al 2023b). However, compared with the previous studies, we looked at an investigation of writing anxiety and task complexity interaction and found there was significant writing anxiety and task complexity interaction for language fluency, language complexity, and language accuracy, respectively.…”

“…We have also found the students in the high writing enjoyment and difficult writing task subgroup present even more language fluency, language complexity, and language accuracy than any other subgroups in the current study, indicating greater predictive power of writing enjoyment on EFL writing achievement than anxiety and boredom, and this finding has been confirmed by Dewaele and Alfawzan (2018), Tahmouresi and Papi (2021) and Li et al (2023b). Compared to the prior studies, the present study examined the interaction effect of task complexity and different writing enjoyment levels on language fluency, complexity and accuracy of EFL writing, so we have found how different writing enjoyment levels with different task complexity presented significant differences in language fluency, complexity, and accuracy.…”

“…Overall, the findings, by comparison with the research conducted by Robinson (2001) and Li et al (2023b), presented evidence that negative emotions like writing anxiety and writing boredom are likely to arise from writing difficult tasks in EFL writing education, the extent to which it can extend the scope of the research about the mechanism of how the different writing task complexity affects the learning emotions.…”

“…Writing tasks, whether they are over-simple or over-difficult, may induce writing boredom. Additionally, writing boredom can be affected by individuals' L2 writing competence, which is evidenced by the empirical study conducted by Li et al (2023b). Due to the difficult writing task in the present study not over-challenging for English major students in China, the students may have less writing boredom while engaging in the appropriately difficult writing task.…”

Foreign language anxiety research in System between 2004 and 2023: looking back and looking forward

“…And no studies on FLA involving FL learners in Africa have been found. Meanwhile, most participants were from urban places, and only a couple of studies explored FLA among rural FL learners ( Hamada and Takaki, 2021 ; Li et al, 2023 ). Last but not the least, with regard to the types of FL, a plethora of studies concentrated on English as a FL.…”