ABSTRACT: This study investigates the relationship between writing anxiety and academic achievement in diploma engineering students of UiTM from Pasir Gudang Campus. Writing anxiety, a prevalent problem among L2 learners, has the potential to have a big impact on their writing abilities. During the third semester of 2022/2023, 172 diploma students from UiTM’s Faculty of Engineering were assessed. The Expository Essay Writing Test was utilised to assess writing performance in the study, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to determine the degree of link between writing anxiety and writing performance. The findings indicated the somatic anxiety dimension had the strongest correlation with respondents’ writing performance, exhibiting a strong negative association (r = -.944**). This discovery emphasises the substantial inverse link between somatic distress and writing performance.

Keywords: correlational study, expository essay, writing anxiety, writing performance