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Title REDUCING WRITING ANXIETY AMONG ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS THROUGH SYSTEMATIC DESENSITIZATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Author(s) SHAZIA NOUREEN

Abstract A common problem encountered by the learners of a second language is that of anxiety and nervousness regarding its correct usage. This was a predicament thought to be limited to speaking skills but quite recently the anxiety related to writing in second language also brought into focus. This research aims at gaining a deeper understanding of writing anxiety faced by ESL learners and suggests systematic desensitization as a viable solution. This research aims at examining the effectiveness of systematic desensitization in reducing the level of writing anxiety among the students of diploma at NUML. The research follows the self-administered procedure of systematic desensitization. It includes three steps, namely: relaxation training, construction of anxiety hierarchy, systematic desensitization procedure. In this research, the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory was adopted to determine the level and types of ESL writing anxiety prevalent among the participants along with a correlating analysis between writing anxiety and writing performance to investigate its effects. The researcher explored the specific causes of ESL writing anxiety among students by keeping this reality in focus that the second language anxiety is caused by multiple factors. The views of the participants were collected by asking six open-ended questions prepared by Attay and Kurt (2006). The present research aims at uncovering the feasibility of making use of systematic desensitization for improving students’ performance on English writing tasks. Systematic desensitization is a technique which is effectively recommended to people suffering from phobias or other academic fears. For this purpose, forty students were selected through purposive sampling from the sixty students of Diploma in English from National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. The selected forty participants were randomly divided into two groups: experimental and control group. Only the experimental group was given therapy. After the comparison of pre-test and post-test results, it was recognized that systematic desensitization was effective in lowering the anxiety and improving the writing skills of English language learners. The results obtained led to two important findings: 1.There is a high level of ESL writing anxiety among English language learners 2. Systematic Desensitization is an effective therapy to curb this anxiety.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2020-03-25

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