Faculty feelings as writers: relationship with writing genres, perceived competences, and values associated to writing

This study attempts to relate faculty feelings towards writing with writing genres, perceived competences and values associated to writing. 67 foreign languages faculty in Colombia and Spain voluntarily filled in a four-section on-line questionnaire entitled The Writing Feelings Questionnaire. All the sections were Likert Scale type. The first, Affective dimension, consisted of a list of bipolar adjectives (feelings) associated to writing; the second, Genres, asked about frequency of use of written genres; in the third one, Competences, faculty evaluated their perceived proficiency in writing competences; in section fourth, Good writing, faculty valued good writing characteristics. Exploratory factor analyses were performed and subsequently, data were related through a co-occurrence analysis. Results showed a three-factor structure for the four sections, associating: (a) writing to feelings of demanding standards of writing, satisfaction and importance; (b) genres to research writing, technical writing and narrative writing; (c) perceived writing competences to the management of formal and technical mechanisms, discursive mechanisms and in a less percentage, composition processes competences; and (d) good writing to data-driven content information, argumentative procedures and rhetoric mechanisms. Correlations showed that perceived proficiency in writing competences was related to all feelings. Besides, participants conceived writing as demanding, but also as important and satisfactory in their profession. In conclusion, being conscious of the importance of writing a specific genre and perceiving as competent writers are the variables that lead faculty identity to devote time and energy to increase their production of research writing genres.