The Combined Impact of Autonomous and Self-Reflective Writing Activities on EFL Learners’ Anxiety Level and Anxiety Reducing Strategies

One debilitative factor in language learning is anxiety which has attracted teachers’ and researchers’ attention for so long. Additionally, learners’ own ability to control and reduce their anxiety level may play a great role in their education success. One way to enhance this capability which eventually leads to lower anxiety could be through involvement in autonomous and introspective activities. This project was conducted to explore the combined effect of autonomous and self-reflective activities on EFL learners’ anxiety and their preferred strategies to reduce their anxiety. Thus, in this experimental research, 61 EFL learners at intermediate proficiency level were selected on availability basis and randomly split to an experimental and a control group. The experimental group was taught through autonomous- activities, and the control group received routine instructions on writing. The two groups were pretested on their anxiety level and their preferred anxiety reducing strategies to make sure that they were homogeneous regarding the two dependent variables. After ten sessions of instructions, the posttests on the two dependent variables were administered to the two groups. One Independent Samples t-test and an ANCOVA analysis were carried out which demonstrated that the intervention could significantly lower the learners’ anxiety, and increase their preferred strategies to lessen their anxiety. The outcomes of this project has remarkable implications for EFL teachers in that they are recommended to include autonomous activities in their syllabus where applicable to help their learners to overcome their anxiety, hence learn better.