Writing Anxiety among Chinese Graduate Students in an American Educational Setting

Extant literature indicates that international graduate students may experience writing anxiety. Using a grounded theory analysis, we sought to understand how Chinese international graduate students (n = 15) experienced writing anxiety in an R1 public university. Findings revealed that writing anxiety among these students was related to (1) their Chinese cultural/educational background, (2) English as a second language, (3) low writing self-efficacy, and (4) fixed mindset (i.e., belief that one's writing aptitude cannot be increased). Chinese students described using different types of self-regulation strategies to alleviate their writing anxiety. Competence-oriented regulation strategies, or a combination of multiple types of strategies, could be effective in managing their writing anxiety and writing processes. However, if students could not manage their anxiety, they procrastinated in their academic writing tasks. When students procrastinated, they were not satisfied with their work and felt poorly about themselves. We discuss several pedagogical implications of the present study and directions for future research.