Thinking Skills and Creativity 42 (2021) 100948

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Thinking Skills and Creativity

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tsc

Exploring the relationships of achievement motivation and state

anxiety to creative writing performance in English as a
foreign language
Hung-chun Wang *
Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei City, Taiwan

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This study aimed to investigate whether English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ creative
Creative writing writing performance was correlated with their achievement motivation and state anxiety and
Achievement motivation could be predicted by these two factors. Data were collected from seventy-one Taiwanese uni­
State anxiety
versity students who took part in an English creative writing task. In this activity, the students
Creative writing performance
English as a foreign language
completed the Questionnaire on Motivation Toward Verbal Creativity in English, the State
Anxiety Inventory, and a creative story. Their stories were compared and each story was rated by
four university English teachers to yield a content creativity score and a language accuracy score.
Both scores were further combined as a total score of creative writing performance. Results
indicated significantly negative correlations between achievement motivation and state anxiety
and between state anxiety and creative writing performance. Only state anxiety alone could
significantly predict creative writing performance, suggesting that the students who felt less
anxious tended to perform better on the story-writing task. Based on the findings, pedagogical
implications are discussed regarding how English L2 teachers can support learners’ creative
writing by dealing with their anxiety.

1. Introduction

Creative writing is prevalently applied in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) and English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms
as an individual or group writing activity. It is “an autonomous, free-choice writing assignment” that encourages students to seek new
ideas and try different writing skills (Yeh, 2017, p. 16). Research on creative writing activities in English-as-a-second/foreign-language
(English L2) education has demonstrated positive effects on L2 learners’ learning (e.g., Arshavskaya, 2015; Stillar, 2013). For example,
creative writing activities are perceived by L2 learners to be motivating and engaging (Arshavskaya, 2015). At the language level,
creative writing also gives EFL student writers a valuable opportunity to become more aware of different writing genres and audiences
(Mak, Coniam & Chan, 2008; Yeh, 2017). In addition, creative writing activities may work “as a self-empowering tool to achieve
particular social positioning and hence self-esteem” for L2 learners (Zhao, 2014, p. 452).
Research in L2 writing has suggested that L2 students with higher writing anxiety tend to write in the target language more poorly,
and that those with higher writing achievement motivation are likely to demonstrate better writing performance (Sabti, Rashid,
Nimehchisalem & Darmi, 2019). Similarly, in creativity research, a number of studies in different domains have also shown that

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: wanghc@gapps.ntnu.edu.tw.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100948
Received 30 April 2021; Received in revised form 21 August 2021; Accepted 7 September 2021
Available online 12 September 2021
1871-1871/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H.-c. Wang Thinking Skills and Creativity 42 (2021) 100948

motivation and anxiety are related to creative performance (e.g., Byron & Khazanchi, 2011; Cooper & Jayatilaka, 2006; Erbas & Bas,
2015). Despite the research outputs in both strands, very little is known about how motivation and anxiety may influence L2 learners
when they are writing creatively in a foreign language that they are still learning. Since L2 creative writing requires learners to
brainstorm novel insights and constantly plan and evaluate their writing, their motivation and anxiety toward writing and/or creative
thinking may influence their performance. Moreover, as indicated in Lubart (2009), creative writing may require distinct thinking
skills and cognitive processes. Considering the distinct nature of L2 creative writing, prior findings in L2 writing and creativity research
that did not take into account the task specificity of L2 creative writing cannot validly reflect the roles motivation and anxiety play in
L2 learners’ creative writing performance.
To bridge this gap, this study focuses on students’ achievement motivation toward thinking creatively and their state anxiety when
engaging in a creative writing task. Achievement motivation refers to “the need for excellence and significant accomplishment, despite
what rewards may be offered after the achievement has been met” (Hsieh, 2011, p. 20). As for state anxiety, Endler and Kocovski
(2001) reviewed Spielberger’s (1966) definition to differentiate it from trait anxiety as follows:
Spielberger defined trait anxiety as an individual’s predisposition to respond, and state anxiety as a transitory emotion char­
acterized by physiological arousal and consciously perceived feelings of apprehension, dread, and tension. (Endler & Kocovski,
2001, p. 232).
In brief, state anxiety pertains to an individual’s feeling of anxiety at a particular moment, and it can take place while he or she is
working on a particular task or taking part in a certain activity. Both achievement motivation and state anxiety may be associated with
English L2 learners’ performance on a creative writing task. Exploring their relationships to creative writing performance is thus
noteworthy for teachers and researchers, as it can help them figure out how to better create a supportive creative writing classroom. To
this end, two research questions are addressed in this study:

(1) What are the interrelationships among EFL learners’ achievement motivation, state anxiety, and creative writing performance?
(2) To what extent do EFL learners’ achievement motivation and state anxiety predict their creative writing performance?

The following section presents a review of the literature to elucidate prior research findings on creative writing in English L2
education and the associations of creative thinking and performance to motivation and anxiety.

2. Literature review

2.1. Creative writing in English L2 education

Creative writing activities have received growing attention in L2 education and have been examined from different perspectives (e.
g., Abu-Rabia, 2003; Arshavskaya, 2015; Stillar, 2013; Tarnopolsky, 2005; Tin, 2011; Turnbull, 2019; Zhao, 2014). Research in this
area has investigated factors that may affect L2 creative writing process or performance, such as working memory (Abu-Rabia, 2003)
and task constraints (Tin, 2011). Creative writing tasks have also been found to benefit students’ learning at different levels, such as
learner engagement (e.g., Arshavskaya, 2015) and critical consciousness (e.g., Arshavskaya, 2015; Stillar, 2013). When creative el­
ements are added to L2 writing assignments, they can “make writing fun”, giving students a strong incentive to learn L2 writing
(Tarnopolsky, 2000, p. 217, emphasis in original). Thus, creative writing can also be a beneficial exercise for students with lower
motivation (Arshavskaya, 2015).
Aside from being engaging and motivating, creative writing activities can also facilitate English L2 learners’ critical consciousness
(Arshavskaya, 2015; Stillar, 2013). For example, focusing on nine Japanese college students learning English in Japan, Stillar’s (2013)
study demonstrated how creative writing assignments facilitated students’ critical consciousness. Stillar designed three creative
writing assignments that required students to write a letter or a journal entry to express their personal insights on a sociocultural issue
(e.g., Japan’s whaling operations). While most students considered these activities to be interesting and thought-provoking, one
noteworthy limitation was that some students felt uncomfortable due to having insufficient knowledge about the writing topics.
Similarly, grounded in the concept of critical pedagogy, the study by Arshavskaya (2015) examined English L2 students’ per­
ceptions of four creative writing assignments. These assignments also required the students to put themselves in different social roles
and write a passage from a particular perspective. For example, one of the activities asked them to do some research and write a
personal letter to an LGBT friend. In general, her study revealed that these activities enabled many students to feel “a greater extent of
empathy and critical consciousness as a result of their engagement in the creative writing activities” (pp. 71–72).
The study by Nicholes (2017) further demonstrates that type of creative writing prompt given has an impact on L2 learners’
narrative-writing engagement and emotional tone. Comparing an autobiographical writing prompt with a critical
consciousness-raising prompt, Nicholes discovered that the participants experienced a significantly higher level of writing engagement
in the autobiographical writing task. One of the reasons is that the autobiographical prompt allowed the students to feel more con­
nected to the imaginary world they were writing about. In addition, writing prompts also influenced L2 learners’ emotional tone. In
this study, the students again demonstrated a more positive tone in the autobiographical task by using more words that express positive
emotions, such as nice, happy, and love. All in all, Nicholes’s study shows that writing prompts influence how much L2 learners engage
in the writing process and how connected they feel to the task.

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2.2. Motivation and creative thinking and performance

This study investigated how achievement motivation and state anxiety correlate with and to what extent they predict students’
creative writing performance in English. Prior studies have found that creative thinking and performance in different domains are
associated with an individual’s motivation (e.g., Ceci & Kumar, 2016; Eisenberg & Thompson, 2011; Erbas & Bas, 2015; Fan & Zhang,
2009; Hong, O’Neil & Peng, 2016) and anxiety (e.g., Carlsson, 2002; Daker, Cortes, Lyons & Green, 2020; Zhang, 2009) to different
degrees. With regard to motivation, theoretical models of the creative process show that motivation plays an important role in creative
thinking. For example, Amabile’s (1996) theory of creative performance takes into account the role of task motivation. The two-tier
model of creative thinking proposed by Runco and Chand (1995) also considers the contribution of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Empirical studies in creativity research have further attested to the varying associations of different motivational attributes with
creative thinking or performance. For example, Erbas and Bas (2015) found significantly positive correlations of mathematical creative
ability to intrinsic goal orientation, but not to extrinsic goal orientation; intrinsic goal orientation was an even better predictor of
mathematical creative ability than personality and academic risk-taking among high school students.
Fan and Zhang (2009) also found a close association between achievement motivation and creative thinking styles. They inves­
tigated the relationships of two aspects of achievement motivation—motivation to achieve success and motivation to avoid failure–to
13 thinking styles that can be classified into three main types of thinking skills: Type I, Type II, and Type III. The Type I category
included five thinking styles that are more favorable to creative thinking, such as judicial and liberal styles. Fan and Zhang discovered
that these Type I styles were all positively correlated with motivation to achieve success and negatively associated with motivation to
avoid failure. All of the correlations reached the significance level except the association between global thinking style and motivation
to avoid failure. Taken together, these findings suggest that people who are more prone to thinking creatively tend to be more
confident and less afraid of facing uncertainty or possible failure.

2.3. Anxiety and creative thinking and performance

Prior studies on anxiety (e.g., Byron & Khazanchi, 2011; Daker et al., 2020; Zhang, 2009) have also shown the close tie of this
affective state to creative thinking and performance. To investigate the relationship of creativity-generating thinking styles to state
anxiety and trait anxiety, Zhang (2009) discovered that several creativity-generating thinking styles (e.g., the legislative style, the
liberal style, and the hierarchical style) were negatively correlated with both state anxiety and trait anxiety. In contrast, Carlsson’s
(2002) study revealed that people with higher creativity seemed to feel higher levels of anxiety. A more recent article by Daker et al.
(2020) delved into creativity anxiety, which “is an anxiety toward a way of thinking (i.e., thinking creatively)” (p. 43). They found that
students tended to feel significantly more anxiety when asked to demonstrate creativity than when asked to follow noncreative re­
quirements in different content domains, such as math, science, music, and visual arts.
A meta-analytical study conducted by Byron and Khazanchi (2011) on 59 independent samples in 57 studies indicates that higher
anxiety is associated with poor creative performance. The association of trait anxiety and creative performance was also found to be
stronger than the association between state anxiety and creative performance. Byron and Khazanchi attributed the latter partially to
the fact that creative tasks tend to draw attention or interest from participants and they may “dissipate state (but not trait) anxiety” (p.
278). This finding also shows the need for more research to further investigate the association between state anxiety and creative
performance in different types of tasks.

3. Methodology

3.1. Participants

This study was part of a larger research project investigating how classroom environments and students’ affective factors were
associated with their creative writing performance, and it specifically focused on students’ affective factors. A total of 71 university
students who came from four freshman English classes at a public university in Northern Taiwan participated in this research. At the
target university, all freshmen were required to take one year of English unless they scored high enough on an English proficiency test
to exempt the class. The freshmen were also classified into four proficiency levels (elementary, lower-intermediate, higher-interme­
diate and advanced) based on a school-wide English placement test. The participants in this study came from four classes at two
proficiency levels: higher-intermediate and advanced. Moreover, data from 12 participants were unusable because the students
omitted items or did not follow instructions in completing the questionnaire. Thus, the analysis was conducted on complete data from
59 participants (27 males, 31 females, 1 unidentified). Their ages ranged from 18 to 21 years (M = 18.88, SD = .75).

3.2. Instruments

Three instruments were adopted for data collection: a story-writing task, the Questionnaire on Motivation Toward Verbal Crea­
tivity in English, and the State Anxiety Inventory. All are described in detail below.

3.2.1. Creative story-writing task

A story-writing task, named Let’s Write a Book Together, was designed to engage the participants in creating a book of stories by
collaborating with a small group of peers. This writing task aimed to form a condition where each student group would publish a

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collection of the stories written by each group member. Each student received a writing booklet delineating the instructions for this
activity and a figure demonstrating the common plot structure of narrative writing. In the booklet, the students were provided with
eight writing prompts, each of which contained three elements, such as “a missing bus, two old ladies, a campfire” and “a toy car, an
explosion, a fortunate manager.” They were required to create a story using two of the eight prompts; they could also add new elements
(e.g., places or objects) if necessary. Combined, the writing condition and the writing prompts worked together as “a seed incident”
that evoked “a mystery, an invitation to exploration and discovery” (Doyle, 1998, p. 30). The participants were then introduced to the
progressive plot structure (cf., Lynch-Brown & Tomlinson, 2005). After the introduction, they brainstormed story ideas alone for 10
min and then discussed their ideas with their teammates for another 20 min. Eventually, they spent another 40 min writing their stories
individually and contributed them to their group’s collection.
After all of the short stories were collected, they were evaluated by four university English teachers. These raters included three
Taiwanese instructors and one American instructor, who were invited because they had many years of experience in teaching English
to Taiwanese learners. Having Taiwanese and American teachers as raters allowed us to obtain both native-speaking and non-native-
speaking English teachers’ perceptions of the students’ creative writing. Following the Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile,
1996), the raters were advised to evaluate the creative stories from a university teacher’s expert perspective without specific scoring
criteria. They received a written evaluation guide that instructed them to read all stories closely first, then compare and rate them on a
scale from 1.0 to 7.0 on two dimensions: content creativity (the novelty level of a story’s plot) and language accuracy. Thus, each story
received two numerical ratings. Analysis of the four English teachers’ ratings for the 59 students yielded acceptable coefficient esti­
mates for content creativity (.74) and language accuracy (.79).
The creativity and accuracy scores each student received from the four raters were aggregated separately. Both scores were then
combined to generate a total score for creative writing performance. This decision to aggregate content creativity and language ac­
curacy scores was motivated by Bae, Bentler, and Lee (2016), who discovered that assessment of content in English L2 story writing
was influenced by five textual qualities, involving the judgment of grammatical accuracy. Based on this finding, it is possible that in the
present study, the raters’ perceptions of linguistic accuracy may have influenced their judgment of a story’s creativity. This study thus
chose to combine content creativity and language accuracy as a holistic indicator of creative writing performance, rather than dis­
tinguishing them as two distinct performance indicators.

3.2.2. Questionnaire on motivation toward verbal creativity in English

The Questionnaire on Motivation Toward Verbal Creativity in English (QMVC), which was designed and validated in the study by
Wang & Cheng, 2016, was adopted in this study to assess the participants’ motivation toward demonstrating creativity in the creative
writing task. This questionnaire was adopted because it had adequate reliability and validity in measuring students’ expectancy for
success and perception of the subjective task value of expressing creatively in English (see Wang & Cheng, 2016, for further infor­
mation regarding the development and validation of this questionnaire). In the current study, to adhere to its focus on creative
story-writing, the item “expressing creativity in English” in the original questionnaire was replaced with “expressing creativity when
writing a story in English.” Item 11 was also slightly amended by removing an example about using puns.
According to Wang & Cheng, (2016), the theoretical foundation for this questionnaire lies in the expectancy-value theory of
achievement motivation (Eccles & Wigfield, 1995; Eccles et al., 1983; Eccles, Wigfield & Schiefele, 1998; Wigfield & Eccles, 1992,
2000). Based on this theory, the questionnaire consists of two subscales: expectancy for success and subjective task value. In this study,
expectancy for success asks questions related to students’ beliefs and expectations about their ability to demonstrate creativity while
writing a story in English as well as the difficulty of doing so. Subjective task value assesses students’ perceptions of the value, interest,
usefulness, necessary effort and personal anxiety regarding expressing creative ideas in the writing task. Combined, both subscales
contain 24 items in total (expectancy for success: 9 items; subjective task value: 15 items), each of which was rated on a 7-point scale. With
responses to all items being added up, the students’ total possible scores range from 24 to 168, with a higher score indicating a higher
level of achievement motivation. In the current study, the 59 students’ responses to the questionnaire indicated high reliability (α =
.90).

3.2.3. State anxiety inventory

The State Anxiety Inventory (SAI) was adopted from the revised State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, Gorsuch & Lushene,
1970), which was translated into Chinese and validated in the study by Chung and Long (1984). As the revised inventory in Chung and
Long’s study included two subscales that probe state anxiety and trait anxiety separately, this study only utilized the state anxiety (SAI)
section because trait anxiety was not the focus of this research. To be specific, the SAI contains twenty items, all of which were
evaluated on a 4-point Likert scale. Reverse coding and calculation of total scores followed the procedure delineated in Chung and
Long, resulting in a total score of 80. As this inventory measures students’ state anxiety in the process of writing stories, a higher total
score means that an individual perceives a higher level of anxiety. In the current study, the students’ responses to this inventory also
showed high reliability (α = .93).

3.3. Data collection procedure

This study was implemented during one class meeting following the procedure below. After the participants signed the consent
forms to participate in this research, they formed self-selected groups of four to five people to complete the story-writing task. The
actual writing process lasted for 40 min in total. Fifteen minutes after they started writing, the participants received the QMVC and the
SAI together and completed them in five minutes. These surveys probed their levels of achievement motivation and state anxiety at that

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moment in the task. Upon completion of the surveys, the participants continued to work on their stories for another 20 min. The
students’ stories, along with their responses to the QMVC and the SAT, were statistically analyzed to address the two research
questions.

3.4. Data analysis

Data collected in this study were analyzed in two ways. Descriptive analysis was first performed to delineate the participants’
responses to or performance on all three instruments. The Shapiro-Wilk Test was then conducted to confirm the normality of the
collected data. To address the first research question, the data were analyzed by means of Pearson’s bivariate correlation analysis. This
analysis aimed to probe whether the participants’ achievement motivation, state anxiety, creative writing performance, and their
distinct components were significantly correlated. For the second research question, multiple regression analysis was conducted to
investigate how well the participants’ achievement motivation and state anxiety could predict their creative writing performance.

4. Results

4.1. Correlational relationships among achievement motivation, state anxiety, and creative writing performance

Table 1 summarizes the results of the QMVC, the SAI, and creative writing performance scores of the 59 participants. The Shapiro-
Wilk Test confirmed the normality of the data on expectancy for success (p = .33), subjective task value (p = .42), achievement
motivation (p = .59), state anxiety (p = .12), content creativity (p = .83) and creative writing performance (p = .96), but not language
accuracy (p = .03). With regard to the language accuracy scores, three cases were identified as outliers (Students 4, 18 and 21). After
the outliers were removed, the results of the Shapiro-Wilk Test were statistically insignificant for language accuracy (p = .08) and the
other variables. Therefore, the final dataset for the subsequent analysis came from 56 participants.
Table 2 further reports on the correlations among the three major variables and their distinct components. As shown in this table,
state anxiety was negatively correlated with expectancy for success (r = -.43, p = .00), subjective task value (r = -.30, p = .03), and
achievement motivation (r = -.39, p = .00), suggesting moderate-to-large correlations according to Cohen’s (1988) standards. This
finding also implies that the learners with higher achievement motivation felt a lower level of state anxiety. Moreover, state anxiety
was negatively correlated with the students’ content creativity (r = -.36, p = .01), language accuracy (r = -.29, p = .03), and overall
creative writing performance (r = -.43, p = .00), which also indicates a moderate or moderate-to-large association. This result means
that the students with a higher level of state anxiety also performed more poorly on the creative writing task. Finally, content creativity
and language accuracy were also significantly related to each other (r = .66, p = .00, a large correlation), indicating that the stories that
had more creative content were also more accurate on the linguistic level. In other words, while the raters were evaluating the
creativity of stories, they may have been influenced by the accuracy of the written language, echoing the findings of Bae, Bentler, and
Lee (2016).

4.2. Predictability of achievement motivation and state anxiety for creative writing performance

Multiple regression analysis was subsequently conducted to examine whether the students’ achievement motivation and state
anxiety could serve as significant explanatory variables to predict their creative writing performance. As the participants came from
two different English levels (i.e., higher-intermediate and advanced), their class level was also entered in the analysis along with
achievement motivation and state anxiety to control for the variation in students’ English proficiency.
The results of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that the three variables altogether could account for 18.5% of the total
variance in the 56 students’ creative writing performance (R2 = .185, F(3, 52)= 3.93, p = .01 < .05), and achievement motivation and
state anxiety could explain 17.3% of the total variance. Results (see Table 3) further show that when achievement motivation and class
level are both controlled, state anxiety alone could significantly predict the participants’ creative writing performance (t = -3.15, p =
.003 < .05). The negative beta weight (β = -.43, p = .00 < .05) suggests that when students had higher levels of state anxiety during the
writing process, they tended to perform more poorly on the story-writing task.

Table 1
Descriptive analysis of the variables under study (N = 59).
Variables Potential range Actual range M SD

Achievement motivation 24–168 58–142 97.88 19.98

Expectancy for success 9–63 13–56 35.24 10.13
Subjective task value 15–105 36–88 62.64 11.88
State anxiety 20–80 23–69 40.69 11.54
Creative writing performance 8.0–56.0 13.0–44.5 29.34 6.92
Content creativity 4.0–28.0 5.00–23.00 14.53 4.10
Language accuracy 4.0–28.0 9.00–22.50 15.15 3.40

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Table 2
Correlations among achievement motivation, state anxiety, creative writing performance, and their distinct components (N = 56).
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

(1) Achievement motivation –

(2) Expectancy for success .89** –
(.00)
(3) Subjective task value .92** .64** –
(.00) (.00)
(4) State anxiety -.39** -.43** -.30* –
(.00) (.00) (.03)
(5) Creative writing performance .16 .15 .14 -.43** –
(.24) (.27) (.30) (.00)
(6) Content creativity .19 .12 .22 -.36** .89** –
(.16) (.40) (.10) (.01) (.00)
(7) Language accuracy .21 .19 .19 -.29* .78** .66** –
(.12) (.15) (.17) (.03) (.00) (.00)

Note. Values in the parentheses show p-values.

*
p < .05
**
p < .01

Table 3
Summary of regression analysis for variables predicting creative writing performance (N = 56).
Creative writing performance
Model B SE β 95% CI t Sig.

1 (Constant) 41.24 8.39 [24.41, 58.06] 4.92 .00

Achievement motivation -.01 .05 -.02 [-.11, .09] -.15 .88
State anxiety -.26 .08 -.43 [-.42, –.09] -3.15 .00**
Class level -.63 2.09 -.04 [–4.83, 3.57] -.30 .76

Note. CI = confidence interval.

**
p < .01

5. Discussion

This study probed whether EFL learners’ achievement motivation and state anxiety would correlate to and predict their creative
writing performance. An essential finding of this research is that state anxiety was negatively associated with creative writing per­
formance (r = -.43) and could significantly predict it. The negative beta weight (β = -.43) shown in Table 3 also indicates that increases
in state anxiety may affect students’ writing performance. In other words, English learners who feel less anxious while writing a story
tend to perform better than their counterparts who feel more anxious. However, as state anxiety can only account for a limited amount
of the total variance in creative writing performance, it is worth noting that there are still other factors that have greater influence on
creative writing performance. Yet, these factors are beyond the scope of the present study.
The moderate-to-large negative correlation between state anxiety and creative writing performance also contradicts the weak
association between state anxiety and creative performance found by Byron and Khazanchi (2011). This difference may be due to the
variations in task types. Although Byron and Khazanchi hypothesized that creative tasks may cause less state anxiety, this may not be
the case when English L2 learners are asked to write a story in a foreign language they are still learning. In this study, the participants
might have more anxiety in the writing process, possibly hindering their ability to write creatively in English. However, the State
Anxiety Inventory adopted in this research cannot allow us to explore whether the students’ anxiety emerged mainly from their
feelings about writing in English or the need to demonstrate creativity. As indicated in Daker et al. (2020), anxiety in a certain task
condition may be related to the task’s content, technical requirements, and demand on creative thinking. Future studies may further
investigate how different types of anxiety are associated with creative performance in L2 writing. Adopting surveys measuring anxiety
specific to English writing (e.g., the L2 Writing Anxiety Scale in Cheng, 2017) or thinking creatively (e.g., the Creativity Anxiety Scale
in Daker et al., 2020) can be useful for this purpose.
In this study, achievement motivation and its distinct motivational dispositions were not significantly associated with creative
writing performance, and this finding is contradictory to prior studies (e.g., Erbas & Bas, 2015; Fan & Zhang, 2009). This result may
derive from the fact that writing in an L2 involves complicated cognitive processes (cf. Flower & Hayes, 1981; Sasaki, 2000, for
example). To write a passage in English, students have to brainstorm ideas and transform them into proper written language.
Nevertheless, even when students have a strong motivation to demonstrate their creativity in writing, they still cannot do it well if they
do not have adequate writing skills.
The findings of this study provide important pedagogical implications for implementing creative writing activities in the EFL
classroom. Considering the negative association of state anxiety with creative writing performance, it is important for teachers to deal
with students’ anxiety while students are working on a creative writing task. To this end, teachers can implement creative writing
activities with little teacher instruction or correction during the writing process (Yeh, 2017). When creative writing tasks are

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integrated into a course, having little teacher instruction or correction will motivate students “to try out unfamiliar genres as well as
express their views” and reduce their “anxiety of doing ‘correct’ writing” (Yeh, 2017, p. 16). Overall, integrating a creative writing
pedagogy with little teacher intervention may enable learners to engage in the creative process, experience the learning benefits they
can gain from the activity, and lower their concerns about the writing task.
It should also be noted that this study yielded a moderate-to-large negative correlation (r = -.39) between achievement motivation
and state anxiety. In other words, L2 students with higher achievement motivation felt lower state anxiety. Of the two motivational
factors, expectancy for success and subjective task value were both found to be negatively correlated with state anxiety. When
implementing a creative story-writing task, EFL teachers can thus lead students to value the task and its benefits for English learning as
well as raising their confidence about their ability to complete the task. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, creative writing
has many benefits for learning a target language (e.g., Arshavskaya, 2015; Yeh, 2017). However, students may not know exactly why
they are asked to think creatively or what they can learn from the creative process. If students can become more aware of the benefits of
creative writing, they are likely to place more value on a creative writing task, which may further reduce their anxiety toward this
activity. Nevertheless, further research is needed to investigate whether enhancing students’ achievement motivation may affect
learners’ creative writing performance through reducing their anxiety. A further search for the indirect effects of achievement
motivation with state anxiety as a potential mediating factor deserves researchers’ attention.

6. Conclusions

The study has several methodological limitations, suggesting two directions for future research. To begin with, following the
Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1996), the four raters evaluated content creativity or language accuracy without
breaking down each story into specific linguistic elements. Future research can further delve into the issue of how students’
achievement motivation and state anxiety influence their performance on detailed linguistic tasks, such as fluency (e.g., number of
words and sentences), complexity (e.g., sentence complexity, lexical variety), and accuracy (e.g., percentage of correct clauses among
all clauses produced). The second limitation lies in the fact that this study implemented a story-writing task without considering other
types of creative writing activities. As shown in Nicholes (2017), the selection of writing prompts influences L2 learners’ writing
engagement and emotional connectedness to creative writing tasks. Future research can thus reexamine the correlations of anxiety and
motivation to L2 learners’ creative writing performance on other types of assignments.
Despite the limitations mentioned above, this study clearly demonstrates that in a story-writing activity, EFL student writers’ state
anxiety during the creative process is associated with their creative writing performance. While teaching creative writing, EFL teachers
should thus pay attention to students’ anxiety so as to build a supportive environment where students can express their ideas freely.
This finding also unravels the need for more research to investigate how learner anxiety may affect L2 creative writing.

Author statement

Hung-chun Wang: Principal investigator of the research project; research investigation; writing; sole author

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This work emerged from a study supported by a research grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (MOST
106–2410-H-003–058). The author would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Yu-Ju Lin at Teaching and Learning Tech­
nologies, Purdue University.

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