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Learning-Related Factors. Psychological Factors
Due to the significance of the psychological factors in learning any foreign or second language, I am focusing here on what research says about these factors in relation to ESL/EFL writing development. There are a number of psychological factors reviewed here including students’ motivation, self-confidence, writing anxiety as well as a number of factors responsible for students’ negative writing apprehension. All these factors seem to play an influential role in student’s ESL/EFL writing development as discussed below. In relation to motivation, Bacha (2002) highlights that low motivation levels can be very difficult and unrewarding for both learners and teachers. She further claims that EFL writers are known to face problems in developing their writing skills at the university level. These problems are even more stressed with L1 Arabic nonnative speakers of English in required English composition courses. In this context, developing students’ writing skills was not a motivating experience, but it was necessary to acquire the basic academic research skills. Another psychological factor that seems influential to students’ writing development is self-confidence. For example, Tyson (1997) underscored that writing multiple drafts, emphasis placed on the "publication" of students' work, and teacher’s comments that focused more on content and organization than on grammatical error helped them produce better pieces of composition and develop 59 more self-confidence in writing. Similarly, Albertson (2006) claims that if students had confidence in their abilities to learn or try new methods, they seemed to adapt or adjust more quickly than those who had little confidence in their literacy practices. Sasaki (2004) revealed that overseas experiences helped students improve their English proficiency, English composition quality/fluency, and confidence in English writing as well as motivation to write better pieces of composition. Writing anxiety is said to negatively influence both the learners’ motivation and academic achievement on one hand and teachers’ attitudes towards writing on the other hand. Research has shown that high apprehensive writers, in comparison with other low apprehensive writers, tend to stop more while composing (Hayes, 1981) and are less concerned with planning the overall structure of their essays (Selfe, 1984) than the low apprehensive ones. In the Egyptian context, For example, Hassan (2001) highlighted that writing apprehension is a crucial factor in the writing development of Egyptian EFL university students. Students with low apprehension wrote better quality pieces of composition than those with high apprehension. This shows that writing apprehension negatively influenced the quality of students' composition writing. Moreover, it was revealed that low apprehension students had higher self-esteem than high apprehension ones, and low self-esteem students were more apprehensive in their writing than their high self-esteem counterparts. Moreover, test anxiety was reported to be one of the reasons given by thirty-two Saudi female college students when asked to comment on their errors (Salebi, 2004). Similarly, Kurt & Atay (2007) showed that the peer feedback group experienced significantly less writing anxiety than the teacher feedback group. It was also revealed that the participating prospective teachers benefited from the peer feedback process as they received opinions from their classmates to elaborate on, and this collaboration helped them look at their essays differently and lessen their writing anxiety. In the same vein, Abdel-Latif (2007) reported that lack of linguistic knowledge, low foreign language competence, self-esteem, poor history of writing achievement and perceived writing performance improvement, low English writing self-efficacy, instructional practices of English writing, and fear of 60 criticism are the factors accounting for the Egyptian English majors’ negative writing apprehension and low English writing self-efficacy.
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