Among the L2 skills, writing is considered one of the most emotion-wrought aspects of language learning due to the high level of students’ engagement and investment in the composing process. Nevertheless, many L2 teachers have neglected the psychological aspects of writing which can be traced to the profession’s history of emphasizing cognition over emotion. Positive Psychology principles highlight the fact that the students’ success in accomplishing educational tasks such as writing depends not only on their knowledge, effort and perseverance but also their psycho-emotional status. Accordingly, the present study, adopting a correlational design, investigated the associations between 40 Iranian EFL learners' writing performance and their perceptions of a set of positive psychology constructs. The required data were collected based on the students' performance on two essay writing tasks and their responses to the items of L2-specific academic buoyancy, L2 writing mindset and willingness to write questionnaires. The correlation coefficients indicated no statistically significant relationship between the students' writing performance and the positive psychology constructs investigated; nevertheless, there was a significant positive relationship between academic buoyancy and willingness to write variables. In addition, the multiple regression analysis showed that among the subscales of the positive psychology measures, the positive acceptance of academic life and regularity adaptation could best predict the writing performance of the students. The MANOVA results also indicated no statistically significant differences among more-skilled, moderately-skilled and less-skilled student writers in terms of academic buoyancy, mindset and willingness to write.
 

Keywords: writing performance, positive psychology, academic buoyancy, L2 writing mindset, willingness to write

     

Add your comments about this article : Your username or Email:

---

---