The Effect of Instructors’ Immediate Behaviors and Clarity on Student Writing Apprehension

Abstract

The demand for writing skills is becoming increasingly prevalent within the U.S. job market. Yet, the biggest barrier to developing successful writing skills, writing apprehension, has received very little attention from scholars in the past 30 years. The present study sought to identify the influence of instructional communicative behaviors on business students’ writing apprehension. Specifically, the study tested a model in which instructors’ immediate behaviors and clarity indirectly influenced students’ writing apprehension through the mediation of perceived immediacy. The data were consistent with the hypothesized model.

Keywords

writing apprehension perceived immediacy immediate behaviors clarity

According to a 2018 article that appeared inForbes, communication is the most vital skill new graduates can possess when entering into the business world (Maull, 2018). This is a particular concern for business educators given the rise of writing apprehension among students, particularly among graduates transitioning into the workplace (Stewart, Seifert, & Rolheiser, 2015). In their seminal study on writing apprehension,Daly and Miller (1975)explained that the most severe detriment to students’ written communication ability is their writing apprehension. Because anxiety depletes the resources of one’s working memory, it is a barrier to successfully completing a task (Söderqvist, Matsson, Peyrard-Janvid, Kere, & Klingberg, 2014). In other words, individuals who experience writing apprehension use their working memory to manage their anxiety symptoms, depleting the resources needed to compose the message and proofread it. Therefore, one of the most critical barriers to students’ ability to learn to write effectively is their own writing apprehension.

Although instructor communicative behaviors, which are the combination of verbal and nonverbal communication cues instructors use in the face-to-face classroom, have been found to correlate with students’ writing apprehension (Autman & Kelly, 2017), no researcher has attempted to model the relationships between instructor communicative behaviors and students’ writing apprehension. An ethical struggle faced by educators wishing to determine pedagogical causation is that they have to engage in experimental research with a control group of students who are likely to experience learning loss as a result of the experimental conditions (Kelly, Romero, Morrow, Denton, & Ducking, 2018). As such, path analysis is a common analytical technique used in instructional communication research to identify statistical patterns consistent with causation in an attempt to identify controllable instructional variables that appear to be influencing classroom outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test a path model to better understand the influence instructors’ immediacy and clarity have on students’ writing apprehension.

Immediate Behaviors

Immediate behaviors were identified in the 1960s within clinical psychiatry as those communicative behaviors a psychiatrist could display that made patients feel physically and psychologically closer to their psychiatrist (Mehrabian, 1966). These included behaviors such as smiling, making eye contact, and using paralinguistics in conversation. Since the identification of immediate behaviors, researchers have identified numerous benefits of communicators engaging in these immediate behaviors during communication in health, organizational, interpersonal, and instructional contexts (Arbaugh, 2001;Baringer & McCroskey, 2000;Jia, Cheng, & Hale, 2017;Kelly, Graham, MacDonald, & Goke, 2018;Kelly & Westerman, 2014;Richmond & McCroskey, 2000;Richmond, Smith, Heisel, & McCroskey, 2001).

Immediate behaviors have been studied with particular interest within the classroom.Finn and Schrodt (2012)found that instructors’ immediate behaviors indirectly influence students’ empowerment through the mediation of perceived understanding. Instructors’ nonverbal immediate behaviors have also been noted to positively affect students’ satisfaction with a course (Zhu & Anagondahalli, 2018). In an investigation of robots as instructors,Kennedy, Baxter, and Belpaeme (2017)found that robots’ use of immediate behaviors increased children’s retention of stories told by robots.Violanti, Kelly, Garland, and Christen (2018)recently replicated three seminal studies on immediate behaviors, confirming that instructor nonverbal immediate behaviors are positively related to perceptions of teacher clarity (Chesebro & McCroskey, 2001) and learning (Richmond, Gorham, & McCroskey, 1987;Wanzer & Frymier, 1999) among Millennials, just as it was observed among Generation X students. Overall, research shows that students tend to consider professors who display immediate behaviors to be more effective than those who do not (Henning, 2012).

Yet, immediate behaviors are not a universal fix for the classroom for two reasons. First, immediate behaviors are specific to culture (Kelly, Liu, Denton, Lee, & Croucher, 2018). This means, as an example, that the same behaviors that reduce psychological distance between a U.S. instructor and a U.S. student, such as eye contact, may increase psychological distance between a U.S. instructor and a Chinese student. Furthermore, similar to verbal communication, sometimes nonverbal communication is misunderstood.Kelly, Rice, Wyatt, Ducking, and Denton (2015)provided an example of an instructional immediacy failure in which a student perceived an instructor’s eye contact to be staring, causing the student to be intimidated rather than assured. Therefore, although immediate behaviors provide an excellent toolkit for instructors to incorporate and refine in their classroom communication, students are not responding directly to those behaviors. Rather, students are responding to their perceptions of those behaviors, which is perceived immediacy.

Perceived Immediacy

Perceived immediacy is the actual change in psychological distance one experiences when considering all of a sender’s communicative behaviors (Kelly, 2012). Notably, perceived immediacy has been studied under other names within the communication literature, specificallygeneralized immediacy(Andersen, Andersen, & Jensen, 1979) andpsychological response to immediacy(Kelly et al., 2015). Regardless of the name assigned to this construct, perceived immediacy has always been assessed through a semantic differential used to calibrate the perceived physical and psychological distance between communicators.

Perceived immediacy is positively related to both verbal and nonverbal displays of instructional immediacy but negatively related to behaviors perceived to be nonimmediate (Violanti et al., 2018). Perceived immediacy has been found to mediate the relationship between instructors’ communicative behaviors and students’ intrinsic motivation (Kelly et al., 2015) and affective learning (Kelly, Drye, & Williamson, 2018). It has also been found to be a mediator between instructors’ immediate behaviors and students’ math anxiety (Kelly et al., 2015;Kelly, Liu, et al., 2018). Instructor clarity, while found to positively correlate with the amount of perceived immediacy an instructor has with a student (Violanti et al., 2018), has never been tested as a potential induction of perceived immediacy.

Clarity

Instructor clarity is defined as the structural, verbal, and nonverbal instructor behaviors that lead to students’ understanding of course content (Chesebro & McCroskey, 2001). Instructor clarity is very important because of its contribution to student learning (Rosenshine & Furst, 1971). In their meta-analysis,Titsworth, Mazer, Goodboy, Bolkan, and Myers (2015)were able to confirm the importance of instructor clarity in student learning, but they experienced difficulties defining instructor clarity.

In addition, conceptualizations of instructor clarity range from low inference (Kennedy, Cruickshank, Bush, & Myers, 1978) to high inference (Sidelinger & McCroskey, 1997), and from unidimensional (Chesebro & McCroskey, 1998) to multidimensional (Kennedy et al., 1978). However, all these instructor clarity constructs represent challenges (Titsworth et al., 2015). To respond to the challenges associated with instructor clarity constructs, a new measure of clarity was needed in the form of a lower inference, multidimensional scale to replace the traditionally used high-inference, unidimensional scales (Kennedy et al., 1978). The most common clarity measure for instructional communication research isChesebro and McCroskey’s (2001)unidimensional measure.

Several instructor behaviors could be used to gain an improved understanding of instructor clarity, including signaling, vagueness, concrete examples, worked examples and explanations, coherence, and redundancy (Bolkan, 2017). Instructors using the signaling category design outlines or summaries of course content and preview/review course content to assist students in focusing their attention to critical course content (Mayer & Moreno, 2010). Vagueness has been defined as “words or phrases indicating approximation . . . or lack of assurance” (Land, 1979, p. 795). Examples include mazes and utterances, which contribute to the instructor’s lack of clarity and hinder the student learning process (Bolkan, Goodboy, & Kelsey, 2016). Instructors who use concrete terms and worked examples and explanations increase their clarity and enhance student learning (Bolkan et al., 2016). Coherence refers to “the relevance of instructor-provided information and describes the notion that teachers sometimes provide content that is not essential for learning course lessons” (Bolkan, 2017, p. 22). Redundancy, on the other hand, “refers to the idea that instructors have unnecessary but related information in their course lectures and is typified by the provision of repetitive information” (Bolkan, 2017, p. 22).

Working memory overload and pacing are critical to instructor clarity and student learning (Chesebro & McCroskey, 1998;Mayer & Moreno, 2010). Instructor-student and student-student interactions in the classroom have a positive effect on student learning (Gaytan & Kelly, 2017). Just as instructor clarity influences students’ working memory, so too does students’ writing apprehension. While teacher clarity can free students’ working memory and allow them to use their cognitive processing power for learning, classroom anxieties, such as writing apprehension, rob their working memory resources, negatively affecting learning and performance (Kelly et al., 2015).

Writing Apprehension

Employers continue to claim that college graduates lack effective writing skills (Anderson, 2014;Fischer, Meyers, & Dobelbower, 2017) and to ask college faculty to make the development of students’ effective writing skills a priority (Ahrens, Meyers, Irlbeck, Burris, & Roach, 2016). Despite efforts by college faculty to respond to the challenges associated with students lacking effective writing skills, many students continue to show writing apprehension or attitudes of writing avoidance, resulting in students neglecting college writing courses (Ahrens et al., 2016;Daly & Miller, 1975) and avoiding the learning process (Daly & Miller, 1975).

Daly and Miller (1975)coined the termwriting apprehension, which “describes the interaction between attitudes toward writing and an individual’s motivations, confidence, and skills to complete a written task” (Fischer et al., 2017, p. 255). A student experiences writing apprehension in situations in which writing is being assessed and often responds to that apprehension by attempting to avoid the assessment (Daly, 1978). College faculty must understand students’ attitudes and fears toward writing (Leggette & Jarvis, 2015) and develop instructional strategies to assist students in overcoming their fear of writing (Fischer et al., 2017). College faculty must “help their students during the development stages of the writing process” (Leggette, 2015, p. 104) by instructing and providing resources and plenty of assignments (Leggette, 2015).

Fischer et al. (2017)found that instructional practices positively affect college students’ confidence in writing, including allowing students to practice their writing, edit, reflect, use a guide for writing, and write about subjects of interest; giving constructive criticism; and coaching.Autman and Kelly (2017)noted that writing apprehension becomes a barrier to student writing performance because students experiencing anxiety may not necessarily perform well on writing assignments, despite possessing knowledge of writing rules. As such,Autman and Kelly (2017)recommended that college faculty should determine if college students’ writing challenges come from writing apprehension or a lack of effective delivery of pedagogical content. College faculty integrating this instructional strategy into their teaching practices may be able to develop interventions to provide supplemental instruction for those students experiencing difficulties with content and/or develop a learning environment in which students experiencing writing apprehension build their self-efficacy (Autman & Kelly, 2017).

Rationale

When considering the instructor communicative variables that may influence student writing apprehension, the most logical first step is to look at variables that have been identified to directly affect other student context anxieties in prior research. Perceived immediacy has been identified as having a direct influence on students’ math anxiety (Kelly et al., 2015;Kelly, Liu, et al., 2018). As such, it is possible that, just as observed in prior classroom anxiety research, students’ perceived immediacy with their instructor will negatively relate to their writing apprehension. Also as observed in previous research, it is expected that the influential instructional communication variables of clarity and immediate behaviors will positively relate to the perceived immediacy students feel toward their instructor. Therefore, the following hypotheses are proposed:

Hypothesis 1:Instructional nonverbal immediate behaviors will be positively related to perceived immediacy.

Hypothesis 2:Instructor clarity will be positively related to perceived immediacy.

Hypothesis 3:Perceived immediacy will be negatively related to writing apprehension.

These hypotheses combine to form the mediated model shown inFigure 1.

Figure 1.

Mediated model.

Method

Participants

A total of 278 undergraduates participated in this study. All data were collected at a moderate-size, AACSB-accredited university in the Southeast United States. Among participants, 119 were male, 158 were female, and 1 student chose not to identify his or her gender. There were 5 freshmen, 136 sophomores, 104 juniors, 32 seniors, and 1 student who chose not to identify class rank. The average age of participants was 20.49 (SD= 3.25).

Procedure

Participants were given a link to an online questionnaire just after midterm in a business communication course, a requirement for all business majors at this university. Participants were instructed that they must think about a business course that they were currently enrolled in that required multiple writing assignments. Distributing the questionnaire in business communication courses guaranteed that all participants were enrolled in at least one such course; however, multiple writing assignments are incorporated into most business courses at this university, meaning that students enrolled in more than one course should have multiple course experiences to choose from when selecting a course to consider before filling out the questionnaire. Therefore, it was requested that participants respond to the questionnaire thinking of a course besides business communication, if possible, in an attempt to capture a wide variety of teaching styles in the data.

Results

Instrumentation

Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were used to test each measurement model before hypothesis testing. Items causing a statistically significant amount of residual error were removed from subsequent analyses. Descriptive statistics for the refined measures are displayed inTable 1.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

	Minimum	Maximum	Mean	Standard deviation	Skewness	Kurtosis	α
Nonverbal immediate behaviors	1.67	7.00	5.82	1.03	−1.19	1.30	.88
Perceived immediacy	1.86	7.00	6.08	1.21	−1.48	1.51	.94
Clarity	2.00	7.00	5.67	1.00	−0.75	0.42	.79
Writing apprehension	1.00	7.00	3.06	1.26	0.28	−0.11	.83

Nonverbal Immediate Behaviors

Richmond et al.’s (1987) nonverbal instructional immediate behaviors measure was used. This 10-item assessment has a 7-point Likert-type response range with responses ranging fromdisagree stronglytoagree strongly.Richmond et al. (1987)reported that the measure has excellent face validity.

Perceived Immediacy

Kelly et al.’s (2015)perceived immediacy measure was used. This 9-item assessment is a semantic differential with a 7-point response range. Kelly et al. reported that the measure displayed evidence of strong content validity.

Clarity

Chesebro and McCroskey’s (2001)Teacher Clarity Short Inventory was used. This 10-item assessment has a 7-point Likert-type response range with responses ranging fromdisagree stronglytoagree strongly.Chesebro and McCroskey (2001)reported that the measure displayed evidence of convergent validity.

Writing Apprehension

Autman and Kelly’s (2017)revised writing apprehension was used. This 6-item assessment has a 7-point Likert-type response range with responses ranging fromdisagree stronglytoagree strongly. The authors reported that the measure displayed content and convergent validity.

Unidimensional Measurement Model Tests

The AMOS maximum likelihood parameter estimation algorithm was used to conduct CFAs on the unidimensional measurement models.Table 2shows the fit statistics of the proposed measures. Each measure had an elevated root mean square error approximation (RMSEA), and every measure besides writing apprehension had a goodness of fit index below .90. Examination of standard residual error matrices revealed that within this sample, particular items in each measure were causing high residual error across multiple other items within the same measure. These items were removed and the measurement models respecified. Nonverbal immediate behaviors lost one item (i.e., has a tense body position). Notably, this item was also lost through the CFA process inViolanti et al.’s (2018)study across four samples, perhaps indicating that the wording used to construct this item in 1987 does not resonate with students 30 years later. Perceived immediacy lost two items (i.e., comforting, aloof). Clarity lost two items (i.e., unclear guidelines, generally unclear communication). Writing apprehension lost one item (i.e., writing is not fun).Table 2also shows the fit statistics of the final measures used for hypothesis and model testing.

Table 2.

Fit Statistics.

		GFI	RMSEA	χ²
Original	Nonverbal immediate behaviors	.87	.15	χ²(N= 278, 35) = 244.55,p< .001
	Clarity	.74	.20	χ²(N= 278, 35) = 429.04,p< .001
	Perceived immediacy	.89	.13	χ²(N= 278, 27) = 147.89,p< .001
	Writing apprehension	.91	.18	χ²(N= 278, 9) = 90.86,p< .001
Modified	Nonverbal immediate behaviors	.94	.09	χ²(N= 278, 27) = 82.68,p< .001
	Perceived immediacy	.94	.10	χ²(N= 278, 14) = 55.73,p< .001
	Clarity	.97	.06	χ²(N= 278, 20) = 40.37,p= .004
	Writing apprehension	.97	.10	χ²(N= 278, 5) = 19.70,p< .001

Note. RMSEA = root mean square error approximation; GFI = goodness of fit index.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1 predicted that instructional nonverbal immediate behaviors would be positively related to perceived immediacy. The data supported this hypothesis,r= .66,p< .05. The correlation matrix for measures can be seen inTable 3.

Table 3.

Correlations.

	1	2	3
Nonverbal immediate behaviors
Perceived immediacy	.66*
Clarity	.75*	.63*
Writing apprehension	−.22*	−.22*	−.26*

Correlations significant atp< .05.

Hypothesis 2 predicted that instructor’s clarity would be positively related to perceived immediacy. The data supported this hypothesis,r= .63,p< .05.

Hypothesis 3 predicted a negative relationship between perceived immediacy and writing apprehension. The data supported this hypothesis,r= −.22,p< .05.

Model Testing

Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed model, again using the AMOS maximum likelihood parameter estimation algorithm. The data were consistent with the model as proposed, χ²(N= 278, 2) = 7.11,p< .001, goodness of fit index = .99, comparative fit index = .99, RMSEA = .10, standardized root mean square residual = .04.Figure 2displays the tested model.

Figure 2.

Tested model.

Discussion

Overall, the data support the proposed model. Although the RMSEA observed in the model test fell above the ideal threshold of .06, it still fell within the realm of mediocre fit (Byrne, 2016). The other fit statistics are well within the boundaries of excellent fit. Therefore, the data are consistent with patterns indicating that instructor clarity and immediate behaviors, through the mediation of perceived immediacy, do indeed affect students’ writing apprehension.

Without managing students’ writing apprehension, they are left without the raw resources (i.e., working memory) necessary to practice and learn effective writing. As such, the careful and intentional use of instructional communication can act as an anxiety intervention within the business classroom to allow students to learn to write more effectively. These writing skills will be invaluable when they are on the job market.

Notably though, instructor immediate behaviors and clarity did not directly reduce students’ writing apprehension. Instead, students’ perceived immediacy directly influenced writing apprehension. The fact that the directly influential variable is perceptual means that it does not matter whether instructors believe they are being clear or immediate; rather, what matters is what the students perceive (Kelly et al., 2015;Kelly, Liu, et al., 2018). This finding reemphasizes the need for student feedback, so that faculty know if their communication is being perceived as intended.

While instructors’ immediate behaviors may change across cultures, there is no evidence to indicate that instructor clarity behaviors change across cultures. Research has indicated that the following instructional techniques enhance clarity:

Giving outlines and summaries of course content to students as well as previewing and reviewing course content to help students focus their attention on essential course content (Mayer & Moreno, 2010)

Using concrete examples to supplement course material (Bolkan et al., 2016)

Achieving coherence and avoiding redundancy when delivering instruction by providing only essential content to students and avoiding repetition (Bolkan, 2017)

Using instructor-student and student-student interactions in the classroom to check for understanding and provide alternative explanations of content (Gaytan & Kelly, 2017)

Yet, as with immediate behaviors, it is important that instructors use these instructional tools skillfully and engage in perception checks to ensure that the execution of such tools is perceived as intended. The same techniques can be used to assist the clarity of training within the workplace.

As cautioned byKelly et al. (2015), the traditional instructor immediate behaviors (e.g., make eye contact, have a relaxed body posture, use vocal inflection, smile) may not be used as a checklist of behaviors that instructorsshouldassume will be beneficial to all students. Although instructor nonverbal immediate behaviors were once touted as instructional panacea, this is only the case in a monocultural classroom with an instructor whose intended message is always understood clearly by students. For effective nonverbal instruction to occur, instructors need to be especially aware of international students in their classes who may assign different meanings to these traditional immediate behaviors than those intended by the instructor (Kelly, Liu, et al., 2018). Physical distance and eye contact are especially important to consider when working with an international student, who may find attempts at immediacy to be very nonimmediate. However, practicing the traditional immediate behaviors while teaching is a wonderful way to begin attempts to increase instructional immediacy overall (Kelly et al., 2015), which the results of this study indicate are an inoculation that instructors can use to reduce students’ writing apprehension.

Future Research and Conclusions

Future research may consider replicating this study at the beginning and end of the semester to see if there is a temporal effect. It would be interesting and informative to see if the magnitude of the effects observed in the model is contingent on the amount of time students have been exposed to the instructor’s communicative behaviors. If there is no temporal effect, then these instructional behaviors should also be effective at lowering writing apprehension in short-term training activities within the workplace as well as within the traditional classroom.

The instructional communication interventions identified within the present study account for a small percentage of the variance in students’ writing apprehension, with clarity indirectly accounting for 7% and nonverbal immediate behaviors indirectly accounting for 5%, respectively. While that indicates that instructors’ communication cannot completely control students’ writing apprehension, it also indicates that other influential variables are yet to be identified that may serve as further inoculations of writing apprehension. Ideally, these variables would not be limited to the classroom so that students can use these tools when writing within their profession. Business communication scholars should seek to identify further means of alleviating students’ writing apprehension that can be utilized beyond the classroom.

In short, analyses of data collected indicate that effective instructional communicative behaviors can be used to indirectly manage students’ writing apprehension. While this is a useful discovery for the classroom, additional interventions need to be identified to allow students to transition to the workplace with tools to manage their writing apprehension as young professionals.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of North Carolina A&T State University (Approval No. 17-0004).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephanie Kelly

Author Biographies

Stephanie Kellyis an associate professor of business communication and codirector of the Quality Enhancement Plan at North Carolina A&T State University. She researches the mediating effect of presence variables in communication.

Jorge Gaytanis an associate professor of business communication in the Department of Business Education at North Carolina A&T State University. He has published over 65 journal articles in the areas of instructional technology, written and oral business communication, online learning, and critical thinking.

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