The differential role of domain-specific anxiety in learners’ narrative and argumentative L2 written task performances Reza Zabihi 1 & Seyed Hamzeh Mousavi 2 & Afsaneh Salehian 3 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Learner individual differences can play differential roles in learners’ performance on different task types of different complexity levels. This study investigates the differential role of domain-specific anxiety in second language (L2) learners’ performances on narrative and argumentative writing tasks. For this purpose, a group of 102 upper-intermediate L2 learners in Iran were asked to perform either a narrative or an argumentative writing task. The study also involved the measurement of learners’ L2 writing anxiety using the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) that represents somatic anxiety (negative feelings such as tension), cognitive anxiety (negative expectations, preoccupation with performance) and avoidance behavior (avoidance in writing). Moreover, the quality of learners’ writings was assessed by eliciting three measures of task performance, i.e. Complexity (clauses per T-unit and dependent clauses percentage), Accuracy (error-free clauses and T-units percentage) and Fluency (average number of words, T-units and clauses per text). Regarding the narrative task, negative relationships were found between cognitive anxiety and both accuracy measures; further, a significant negative correlation was found between somatic anxiety and an accuracy measure of narrations. On the contrary, the effect of writing anxiety on argumentative task performance was more extensive: negative correlations were observed between cognitive anxiety and all three measures of fluency, one complexity measure and one accuracy measure; avoidance behavior was also negatively associated with two fluency measures and one complexity measure. The implications of the study are discussed. Keywords Domain-specific anxiety . L2 written task performance . CAF . Task type . Argumentative writing . Narrative writing Introduction Anxiety is one of the individual differences that influence the process of learning. Researchers have contended that when learners perform tasks that require productive skills, they ex- perience considerable amount of anxiety (Hilleson 1996; Zhang 2001). In the past three decades, the speaking skill has been considered to be the most anxiety-inducing of the four language skills, setting the scene for numerous studies on the role of anxiety in learners’ oral performance (e.g., Hewitt and Stephenson 2011; Horwitz 2001; Liu 2007; Phillip 1992; Young 1986). This is partly because research on anxiety started in the 1980s, a time when communicative language teaching (CLT) and its focus on the oral dimensions of language use were in vogue. However, granted the fact that writing is an individual and product-oriented task, learning to write may involve as much anxiety as does learning to speak (Tsui 1996), causing learners to suffer from a Bdistress associated with writing^ and to develop Ba profound distaste for the process^ (Madigan et al. 1996, p. 295). In this connection, several researchers have regarded writing anxiety as a particular type of anxiety which belongs to the language-particular skill of writing (Bline et al. 2001; Cheng 2004; Daly et al. 1988). Such anxiety can be even greater when we consider writing in a second language (L2) context where learners are required to think and write in a less-familiar language than their mother * Reza Zabihi zabihi@neyshabur.ac.ir Seyed Hamzeh Mousavi hamze.mousavi@outlook.com Afsaneh Salehian afsanesalehian.as21@gmail.com 1 English Department, University of Neyshabur, Adib Blvd, Neyshabur, Khorasan Razavi, Iran 2 Department of Applied Linguistics, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran 3 Department of English, Khorasan e Razavi Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Neyshabur, Iran Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9850-6