STUDENTS’ WRITING ANXIETY AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF STATE ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF KERINCI

This study aims to analyze the anxiety of writing English in State Islamic Istitute of Kerinci students. Writing anxiety is one of the anxiety that occurs in foreign language anxiety. This is the fear of writing when someone has to start, work on, or finish writing given a task. By conducting survey research, this research describes the level, dominant type, and main factors of writing anxiety of English students and how to overcome the level of writing anxiety. Sixty-eight English students in semester three and semester five joined this research. Two types of questionnaires were used in this study, namely the first (SLWAI) which was adapted from Cheng, and the second was the Writing Anxiety Factor which was adapted from Zhang. This questionnaire was used to check why students experienced anxiety in writing. The findings reveal that the average level of anxiety level is 69.46. The dominant type of writing anxiety is somatic writing anxiety, which is based on the highest average between the other two types of writing anxiety. Then there are three main factors that cause writing anxiety, namely linguistic difficulties (82.4%), lack of topic knowledge (69.1%), insufficient writing technique (60.3%).