Anxiety and Performance in Second Language Writing: Does Perfectionism Play a Role?

This study investigated the relationships among perfectionism, writing anxiety and writing achievement among Iranian EFL learners. To this end, a sample of 402 second year undergraduate students of English filled out the perfectionism and writing anxiety questionnaires. Students’ writing achievement was also obtained through their final writing scores at the end of the semester. In the first stage of data analysis, the results of descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression indicated that from among the three types of perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism is the best predictor of writing anxiety. Writing anxiety, self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism were found to be significant predictors of writing achievement, respectively. In the second stage of data analysis, a hypothetical model of the relationship between the variables was proposed based on the findings of the first part. IThe results of path analysis revealed that despite the existence of a significant relationship between each pair of variables, the model proposed here did not have sufficiently high goodness of fit as a whole.