Students' Writing Anxiety: How Does It Affect Students' Writing Performance in EFL Context?

A rapidly growing body of research has been recently focusing on the various aspects of foreign language writing due to the fact that constructing a comprehensive and coherent written text is the most challenging task encountered by foreign language learners. Possessing a good writing ability is dependent to many aspects including the learners' psychological aspects. One of the most influencing aspects is writing anxiety, which has been claimed to influence learner' motivation and attitudes towards writing. In addition, despite the substantial body of research that has investigated how writing anxiety interacts with general language proficiency, there is a general lack of research in establishing the relationship between writing anxiety and writing performance. As a reflection to the these matters, the current paper reviews the literature in relation to the two mentioned variables to explore, identify, and analyze the unique relationships existing between writing performance and writing anxiety in order to shed light on this crucial topic and to provide an up-to-date and well-structured overview of the literature in terms of the extent to which writing anxiety impacts the writing performance based on literature and previously conducted studies. The overview provided by the current paper will contribute significantly in providing an overview of knowledge available for future researches and real-world applications in order to deal with the previously mentioned problems facing EFL learners in terms of writing skill mastery.