Foreign Language Writing Boredom and Anxiety in Online Classes: The Impact of Freewriting

Introduction

COVID-19, the global concern and major challenge of the modern world, has led to the destruction of people’s health and life (Gao & Zhang, 2020). The pandemic, declared due to the unpredictable rapid spread of the virus and the uncertainty that followed, has deeply affected education as well as all elements of human life (Erarslan, 2021). In accordance with the social distance advice given by the World Health Organization (WHO) considering the deadly effects of the virus, traditional face-to-face education has rapidly been supplanted by emergency online education at all levels from primary school to higher education since the spring of 2020 (Moser et al., 2020).

Students experience several emotions when they are engaged in learning (Raccanello et al., 2018). However, the immediate closure of schools and universities due to the virus has been a dramatic shock for them, causing their feelings toward learning to change. Due to students’ and teachers’ unfamiliarity with the new mode of education, negative emotions, such as boredom and anxiety, have become the overwhelming feelings experienced by the learners (Russell, 2020; Yazdanmehr et al., 2021). These emotions also lie at the heart of foreign language (FL) learning (Dewaele, 2015), yet remain woefully understudied constructs (Miller & Godfroid, 2019).

In the FL learning process, unlike other skills, writing ends up being the skill in which many language learners face arduous challenges that are reported to create a negative influence on their motivation to write (Teng et al., 2020). Limited vocabulary, difficulty in finding alternative expressions, and transforming ideas into words have made writing a difficult skill for students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) (Chen, 2019). Moreover, teachers’ pressure on students to produce accurate language in EFL writing classes transforms them into unpleasant experiences (Park, 2020). These negative connotations of writing lead to higher anxiety in FL writing (Sivacı, 2020; Tsiriotakis et al., 2017).

Writing anxiety has long been recognized in FL research as provoking feelings of oppression and detestation (Madigan et al., 1996). In addition to these negative feelings, FL writing is mostly known as a boring chore completed for a grade rather than intrinsic motives (White & Arndt, 1991). It is rarely a preferred activity in English classes (Tarnopolsky, 2000). Furthermore, due to the online nature of classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, the level of boredom in online classes is significantly higher than in face-to-face classes in FL learning (Li & Dewaele, 2020). However, despite its frequency, boredom has been mostly ignored by FL researchers (Pawlak et al., 2020b).

Considering these two feelings that may be associated with failure in FL writing, several approaches have been developed by writing teachers to break the vicious cycle that FL learners experience (Park, 2020). One of these approaches is freewriting, which simply refers to writing quickly for a set time without pausing and worrying about words, grammar, and further modification (Li, 2007). However, few studies have been published on freewriting in EFL contexts (Hwang, 2010; Park, 2020). Therefore, not much is known regarding EFL students’ perspectives on freewriting and its potential impact on the emotions of these learners in online academic writing classes. Hence, this study attempts to investigate the potential impact of freewriting on EFL students’ writing anxiety and boredom in an online academic writing class.