Factors affecting foreign language speaking anxiety levels of 8th grade students at public secondary schools

It is a well known fact that there are some factors having a significant role on foreign language learning process. Learners develop a positive or negative attitude toward foreign language learning based on these factors. Apart from foreign language learning enjoyment, unfavorable emotions have some detrimental effects on most areas including using the target language. Therefore, it is necessary that instructors or teachers should pay attention to the emotions of their students during language learning or teaching process by considering other factors as well. Among all of the negative emotions, foreign language speaking anxiety is the most common one learners have to cope with. So, the aim of this study is firstly to find out the anxiety levels of the 8th students in public secondary schools. After finding the foreign language speaking anxiety level of the participants in relation to sub- skills of the FLSA Scale, it tries to determine whether other factors such as gender, family members speaking English, out-of-school English course, interest and enjoyment of English lesson, teacher's teaching style, in-class activities, studying or using English outside the classroom, out of classroom activities, exert any effect on participants' FLSA levels. This study conducted at 5 different public secondary school in Sarıçam County of Adana. 250 students (117 females and 133 males) participated in the research. The data related to the anxiety level of the participants were collected through FLSA Scale, which was developed by Horwitz et all. (1986) and adapted by Saltan (2003). It includes 18 items of four categories such as communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety and general classroom anxiety. The results of the study revealed that the participants could be accepted moderately anxious. Additionally, the findings displayed that males are more anxious than females in this study. Lastly, according to the inferential and descriptive statistics, there is a statistically significant effect of gender, students' interest in English lesson, teacher's teaching style, in-class activities like songs, games, question & answer, studying for test, studying and using English outside the class and out-of-classroom activities such as writing mails in English, use of social media, searching for English homework, on participants' FLSA levels. However, the study revealed that some other factors such as family members speaking English and English courses out of school do not show any statistically significant effect on participants' FLSA levels. Key Words: Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety, Communication Apprehension,Fear of Negative Evaluation, Test Anxiety, Social Factors