Exploring the relationships of achievement motivation and state anxiety to creative writing performance in English as a foreign language

•State anxiety was negatively correlated with content creativity, language accuracy, and creative writing performance.•State anxiety could significantly predict EFL learners’ creative writing performance in English.•Achievement motivation was not significantly associated with creative writing performance. This study aimed to investigate whether English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ creative writing performance was correlated with their achievement motivation and state anxiety and could be predicted by these two factors. Data were collected from seventy-one Taiwanese university students who took part in an English creative writing task. In this activity, the students 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.