This study examined the writing apprehension of learners of English as a foreign language at a public university in Bangkok, Thailand. The participants involved in this study were 105 graduate students who had low English proficiency. The Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test was administered to the participants to ascertain their writing apprehension levels: a high level, a low level and a middle anxiety level, and types of writing apprehension: evaluation apprehension, stress apprehension, and product apprehension. Semi-structured interviews were conducted eight weeks after the test, with ten randomly selected participants in each group specifically to determine the causes behind the reported apprehension problems.
The findings revealed that overall apprehension scores are close to a high level, suggesting a large number of participants who had the high writing apprehension level outnumber the participants with the low and the middle writing apprehension levels. With respect to the apprehension types, most participants had the highest apprehension in the writing evaluation. The underlying causes of their writing apprehension mainly stem from the lack of schemata, linguistic competence and affective factors.