University Students’ Attitude towards Affective Domain of Academic Writing: Gender Differences and Association with Achievement

Language is the very basic source of transferring ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings to others, and, therefore, plays highly important role in academic life of a student. Among the four basic language skills, the role of writing skill is considered the strongest for the development of the learners. Of the writing skills, students’ academic writing skills is highly focused area, as it is a mean of written communication and, therefore, essential for the academic and professional achievement of learners. Research demonstrates that students’ academic writing skills are also linked with their attitude towards writing in all domains of Bloom’s taxonomy i.e., cognitive, affective, and the behavioral. Considering the importance of the affective domain of students’ academic writing, this research is especially focused on examining university students’ attitude towards affective domain of academic writing. Furthermore, current research study would also examine students’ attitude towards affective domain of academic writing from the perspectives of gender differences, discipline-wise differences, undergraduate and postgraduate differences, and its association with students’ achievement. The current study is descriptive in nature and uses survey research design. For sampling, multistage cluster method was adopted. Total sample size of the current study comprised 972 university students. Tool of the study was a questionnaire, which comprised two sections. The first section of questionnaire focused on collecting demographic data from the participants, while the second section comprised five-point Likert scale, with a set of ten statements regarding students’ attitude towards affective domain of academic writing. First comprised arithmetic mean and SD, while t-test was used from inferential statistics. The results showed that although university students from Multan City have low moderate positive attitude towards Blooms’ affective domain of academic writing, but some gender and discipline-wise differences exist.