LANGUAGE LEARNING ANXIETY

Abstract

Anxiety in Foreign Language Learning is one of the negative obstacles that may face the learning and teaching process, and lead to uncomfortable contexts and situations. That is why this empirical study aims to identify the relationship between anxiety and learners’ performance, and compare the English Language Anxiety between two years in the middle school which are the First-year and the Fourth-year. The total of participants is 112 students, divided into 57 from the first-year students and 55from fourth-year students and each level were given two questionnaires which were inspired by the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) with a simple modification in order to suit the participants as well as the subject. The results showed that both groups have similar issues with language learning anxiety, also that there is no connection between first grade students and more experienced students in learning a certain language and the level of anxiety experienced by each group, and finally it indicates that there is no significant relationship between low performance in language learning and language learning anxiety.