THE CORRELATION BETWEEN EFL STUDENTS' LANGUAGE WRITING ANXIETY AND CREATIVE WRITING ABILITY IN A UNIVERSITY CONTEXT

Creative writing is a common activity applied in classroom; however, students face difficulty in writing correctly and expressing their thoughts effectively when writing in English. The purpose of this research is to know the level of foreign language writing anxiety, creative writing ability of students, and the correlation between foreign language writing anxiety and creative writing ability. This research applied quantitative approach with the correlational research design. The participants were consisting of 87 students of English Language Education Department (ELED) who were enrolled in and passed the Literary Appreciation course. The instrument of this research were 22-items of Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) adapted from Rezaei and Jafari (2014) and the grades of Literary Appreciation course. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Pearson’s product-moment correlation (r). The results showed that the level of foreign language writing anxiety was in the low category (M = 50.72; SD = 11.56) and students’ creative writing ability was in the high category (M = 75.91; SD = 6.86). The result also revealed the significance value of 0.017 < 0.05 which means the hypothesis is accepted with the correlation value (r value) of -0.255. This is indicating a negative very low correlation between foreign language writing anxiety and creative writing ability. So, it can be concluded that the lower one’s EFL students’ writing anxiety, the higher their creative writing, and vice versa.