The effect of film activities on the english speaking anxiety and attitudes of students to the lesson: An action research

In this study, it was aimed to determine the effect of English film activities with subtitles on the secondary school students' attitudes towards English lessons and their English speaking anxiety levels. In addition, students' opinions were also examined. In this study, pretest-posttest control group experimental design was used. The study group consisted of 7th and 8th grade female students attending Hocalar Boarding Regional Secondary School in Afyonkarahisar in 2018-2019 academic year. The students were assigned as the experimental group (n=16) and the control group (n = 15) according to their scores from the English Speaking Anxiety scale which was applied as pretest. Experimental process lasted 8 weeks. With the experimental group, the researcher performed English film activities with subtitles in two days of each week. Before and after the activities, with the necessary permissions obtained, "Attitude Scale for Elementary English Course" and "English Speaking Anxiety Scale" were applied to both experimental and control groups. The principles of Communicative Language Teaching, one of the foreign language teaching methods, have been taken into consideration when creating English film activities. In order to compare the experimental and control groups' averages of the attitudes towards English course and English speaking anxiety levels after the activities, independent samples t-test and Mann Whitney U-test were used. In the process of analyzing qualitative data, data coding, theme finding, editing of codes and themes, and defining and interpreting the findings were carried out. According to the findings, the applied film activites has no significant effect on students' attitude towards English course or English speaking anxiety levels (p>.01). Moreover, it can be said from the findings obtained from the qualitative data that the film activities have no positive effects on students' attitudes or speech anxiety. Key Words: Attitude towards English Course, English Speaking Anxiety, Action Research